Friedrich Chasin

Sustainability: Are We All Talking About the Same Thing? State-of-the-Art and Proposals for an Integrative Definition of Sustainability in Information Systems

Degradation of the natural environment is presently attracting significant attention among the Information Systems (IS) academic community. Consequently, the subject of sustainability continues to gain a foothold in the mainstream of IS research. However, as the body of research grows, the exact meaning of sustainability is increasingly becoming a source of uncertainty. The absence of a clear definition of sustainability in the IS domain poses a challenge for operationalizing the concept and limits the methodological viability of research in the field. By means of a systematic literature review, this paper identifies problems related to diverging or even a complete absence of sustainability definitions in the relevant IS literature. The results reveal what constitutes a sound definition of sustainability as a characteristic of a stakeholder activity and a new perspective for Information Systems research on sustainability, in which an activity becomes a quantum of sustainability analysis. The paper discusses the broader implications for further research.

Designing a Peer-to-Peer Sharing Service as Fuel for the Development of the Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

The general public and politics discuss electric vehicles (EVs) as promising means for achieving clean, carbon-free, and sustainable individual transportation. However, an insufficient charging infrastructure hampers a rapid diffusion of EVs. At the same time, investors have refrained from developing an EV-charging infrastructure on a large scale because of the limited demand for EVs. Against this backdrop, peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and collaborative consumption (SCC) is a promising strategy with which to address this problem. This article describes the concept of an IT-based P2P SCC service and the research activities needed for its design. We do so by introducing a novel application of the sharing economy. Our primary contribution is to take a step toward finding a solution for a problem in the EV domain that is relevant for society. A second contribution lies in the introduction and discussion of predominantly infrastructure-creating (PIC) P2P SCC services and their characteristics.

Designing an Ontology-Based Web Directory for the Discovery of Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Platforms

A vast number of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and collaborative consumption (SCC) platforms has emerged over the last decade. These platforms allow private individuals to share their physical resources, such as vehicles, spaces, food, clothing, gear and even pets, with other private persons. The large number and diversity of the platforms make it difficult for potential peer-consumers and peer-providers to find an appropriate platform for their demands or offers. This research therefore designs an ontology-based web directory which facilitates an effective discovery of P2P SCC platforms. The paper includes three major contributions. First, we formalize concepts identified in the SCC literature by means of a description language. Second, we develop an ontology that provides a means to purposefully describe the domain of SCC platforms. Third, we describe the design of a web directory that uses the ontology to make discovering P2P SCC platforms more approachable.

Taking Peer-to-Peer Sharing and Collaborative Consumption onto the Next Level – New Opportunities and Challenges for E-Government

Rapid advances in IT combined with increasing awareness for environmental side-effects of modern economies are causing a shift in the consumer behavior towards new forms of consumption. Private individuals increasingly become both providers and consumers of services. Web 2.0 enables peer-topeer transactions between consumers creating a new consumption space with hundreds of mediator platforms. While the new legally questionable market is typically seen as a challenge by governments, the opportunities for governments to participate in peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing and collaborative consumption services (SCCS) for their citizens are hardly explored in academia. In contrast, first pioneer governments such as the cities of Seoul and San Francisco have already developed strategies to support the development of P2P SCCS for their citizens. In this work, we advocate for extending the function scope of e-government by including P2P SCCS into its portfolio. To support our reasoning and in order to systematically address the problem area emerging from the combination of e-government and P2P SCCS, we review and synthesize e-government models and relate them to the P2P SCCS phenomenon. Our results reveal what constitutes a research agenda for utilizing potentials of P2P SCCS in the context of e-government research and practice.

Leveraging social media to gain insights into service delivery: a study on Airbnb

Consumers increasingly rely on reviews and social media posts provided by others to get information about a service. Especially in the Sharing Economy, the quality of service delivery varies widely; no common quality standard can be expected. Because of the rapidly increasing number of reviews and tweets regarding a particular service, the available information becomes unmanageable for a single individual. However, this data contains valuable insights for platform operators to improve the service and educate individual providers. Therefore, an automated tool to summarize this flood of information is needed. Various approaches to aggregating and analyzing unstructured texts like reviews and tweets have already been proposed. In this research, we present a software toolkit that supports the sentiment analysis workflow informed by the current state-of-the-art. Our holistic toolkit embraces the entire process, from data collection and filtering to automated analysis to an interactive visualization of the results to guide researchers and practitioners in interpreting the results. We give an example of how the tool works by identifying positive and negative sentiments from reviews and tweets regarding Airbnb and delivering insights into the features of service delivery its users most value and most dislike. In doing so, we lay the foundation for learning why people participate in the Sharing Economy and for showing how to use the data. Beyond its application on the Sharing Economy, the proposed toolkit is a step toward providing the research community with an instrument for a holistic sentiment analysis of individual domains of interest.

A METHOD FOR MEASURING USER PREFERENCES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS DESIGN CHOICES

Information System Design (ISD) applies information technology to achieve desired ends in organizations and implies many technology choices to be made. A successful design of information systems addresses the different views of all its stakeholders in these decisions. If we consider that sub-part of an IS that is intended to assist in customer processes, a purposeful assessment of the preferences of this anonymous mass is needed. Methods of Human-Centered ISD are not sufficient in that case for that they require too close integration of the subjects; and state of the art preference measurement techniques are likely to be too time-consuming and cognitively challenging if the number of alternatives is large. Building on the Q-Methodology, originally developed to reveal subjectivity in psychology, we suggest a novel method for user preference measurement. We report on a case in which we failed by applying standard techniques for user measurement, but succeeded with Q-Sort. By means of an experiment we subsequently compare the mentioned methods and identify root causes for failure and success we experienced in the case, which for Q-Sort include short execution time, measuring many design choices at one time, satisfaction of the interviewees, and an effective IT support.

CrowdStrom: Analysis, Design, and Implementation of Processes for a Peer-to-Peer Service for Electric Vehicle Charging

(a) Situation faced: An inadequate number of publicly available charging points is among the main reasons that consumers do not buy electric vehicles (EVs). To address this problem, we suggest a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing approach for private charging infrastructures. We formed a joint consortium between academia and industry to design and implement a web platform and an underlying business model for an infrastructure of individually owned EV-charging stations for public use. Currently, there are no standardized processes for EV charging, so we had to look elsewhere for processes that could be adapted or partly adopted as a foundation for the proposed web platform. (b) Action taken: We interviewed representatives of seven organizations that are already operating in the domain of EV charging about the relevant business processes. Applying the BPM lifecycle (Dumas et al., Fundamentals of business process management. Springer, 2013), we analyzed the resulting as-is processes for best practices and redesigned them for the scenario of a P2P platform for EV charging. (c) Results achieved: Sixteen to-be processes that comprised registration, authentication, charging, billing, and administration were modeled in BPMN and implemented in a software prototype. The prototype and associated processes are currently being evaluated to ensure their validity and effectiveness in the target environment while the partnering utility company prepares the solution’s staged roll-out to operate their own charging stations and then open the system to other providers. (d) Lessons learned: Analyzing and then designing business processes to reach a common goal has been a unifying factor in our joint research project, where partners from industry and academia have differing backgrounds, expectations, and individual goals. BPM practices enabled the project team to create an innovative business model and corresponding business processes that will have an impact in practice.