Hannes Göbel

Nascent Design Principles Enabling Digital Service Platforms

To facilitate innovation of value-enabling IT services in a service ecosystem, digital service platforms are needed. However, existing service platforms, neither fully inscribes premises of the service dominant logic, nor the principles of open innovation. Seldom are they digital. We argue that there is a lack of consolidated normative theory of how to design digital service innovation platforms. This is problematic, because it hampers actors in service ecosystems to combine and advance their capabilities. To this end, researchers and practitioners have jointly designed and evaluated a digital service platform using Action Design Research methodology. Accordingly, the overall purpose of this paper is to present intermediate results from the evaluation of the digital service platform and to contribute nascent design principles enabling researchers and practitioners to leverage other instances of purposive digital service platforms.

The Conceptual Confusion Around “e-service” : Practitioners Conceptions

The e-service concept has been a central concern in many research and practitioner areas in recent years. There are expectations of citizens, customers, commercial companies and public organizations of what e-services are, their functionality and benefits. However, there is conceptual confusion that may hamper collaboration and research viability. This paper explores the conceptual vagueness and presents an empirical investigation of how the e-service concept is treated in practice, along with its kindred concept “IT service”. Results show that public and commercial organizations approach e-services differently, that translation problems can cause lack of comparability in research results, and that additional concepts may be introduced instead of e-service.

IT Service Management: Core Processes Aligning Business and IT

The problem we address is that researchers have insufficiently investigated the processes and nuances of Business and IT alignment. One attempt to tackle Business and IT alignment in a process-oriented way is to adopt the concept of IT Service Management (ITSM). However, identified challenges entails that ITSM is hard to define and that existing ITSM frameworks sometimes are considered as overly complex containing an extensive process scope, making it costly and hard to implement. The purpose of this workshop paper is to understand in what way are ITSM core processes supporting business and IT alignment? Our qualitative research approach embraced a two-phase method based on empirical studies where identified core processes were mapped using the Strategic Alignment Model. The result shows that the core of ITSM consists of five processes and that these processes somewhat constitute the bridges and interfaces that aligns Business and IT.