Mateusz Dolata

How IT-Artifacts Disturb Advice Giving -- Insights from Analyzing Implicit Communication

It has been shown that IT disturbs interpersonal communication in co-located advisory services. The central property of such encounters is their interpersonal character and therefore effective communication is essential for high quality service. While the available literature identifies some factors influencing the communication, the role of implicit communication and how IT influences it remains underexplored. In this paper we provide an analysis of 24 realistic financial service encounters. We observe unexpected conversation patterns that require further clarification, e.g., clients who abruptly stop talking or advisors who interrupt the clients. We identify the feedback in conversation as the communication component that suffers a lot from the introduction of IT. In the conventional advisory setting we did not observe those critical episodes. We discuss our findings in light of IS, CSCW, and communication science literature. The findings have implications for the future design of IT-supported service encounters.

Why do you ask all those questions? Supporting client profiling in financial service encounters

Client data is key to provide personalized services and products. Therefore, banks go through great efforts to profile their clients during financial advisory service en- counters. Since traditional pen-and-paper profiling does not satisfy the banks’ needs, they strive to digitalize this activity. This paper offers joint profiling as a so- lution: The advisor and the client jointly create a cli- ent’s profile using a shared display. However, test cli- ents provided a mixed response to a first joint profiling prototype. They wondered, why the bank needs all this information. In a second iteration, joint profiling was augmented by task awareness, i.e., linking all profiled information to the clients goal. This task aware joint profiling was far better accepted by the clients. This paper offers research insights on the role of profil- ing in face-to-face advisory service encounters, on its acceptance by the clients, and on design principles for digital profiling in financial service encounters.

Paper Practices in Institutional Talk: How Financial Advisors Impress their Clients

Paper is a persistent element of financial advisory encounters, despite the increasing digitisation of the financial industry. We seek to understand the reasons behind the resilience of paper-based encounters and advisors’ resistance to change by understanding the paper’s roles in financial advisory encounters. While applying multimodal analysis to a set of field and experimental data, we point to a range of prevalent advisory practices that rely on the use of paper documents and hand-written notes. We focus on the choreography of paper and how this intersects with the participants’ institutional identities and goals. Specifically, we show how advisors’ paper-oriented actions seek to convey a positive impression about the advisor and about the bank to the client, i.e. how they engage in seemingly mundane practices to impress their clients. Paper is far more than a medium for saving and presenting information: it is an interaction resource, a semiotic resource and an institutional resource; all these aspects of paper come into play during a financial advisory encounter. The manuscript concludes with suggestions on the design of technologies that may potentially replace the paper in financial advisory encounters and assesses the likelihood of this in light of the results.

Persuasive Practices: Learning from Home Security Advisory Services

Research on persuasive technologies PT focuses, primarily, on the design and development of IT for inducing change of individuals behavior and attitude through computer-human and computer-mediated influence. The issue of practices in co-located human-human persuasive encounters remained unattended in the PT community. This study uses the notion of persuasive practices to understand the course of events in face-to-face home security advisory sessions --- it specifies and illustrates such practices and discusses their impact on the persuasiveness of the encounter. Furthermore, it presents potential of IT to support such persuasive practices thus opening new research possibilities of PT research.

FinTech Transformation: How IT-Enabled Innovations Shape the Financial Sector

FinTech, the phenomenon which spans over the areas of information technologies and financial innovation, is currently on the rise and is gaining more and more attention from practitioners, investors and researchers. FinTech is broadly discussed by the media, which constitutes its understanding and represents social opinion, however, this perception of FinTech should be supported by empirical evidences. Therefore, we examine five Swiss FinTech companies through the lens of the conceptual framework of understanding of FinTech and its dimensions and, by doing so, analyze the nature of FinTech innovations. Thereby, we extend the understanding of FinTech and provide a fruitful soil for further research in this area.

Unpacking the Artifact Knowledge: Secondary Data Analysis in Design Science Research

Evaluation of design artifacts generates a set of scientifically valuable data, which is primarily used to prove the utility of the artifact or to identify potential for improvement. Extension of such studies by reanalyzing the same data set did not attract much attention in design-oriented research and design science. However, the reuse of this data with the secondary analysis approaches can provide valuable insights on artifact-based interventions. This paper aims at launching a debate on the role of secondary analysis in DSR. We argue that secondary analysis of evaluation data shall be granted respect within the DSR-IS community as a valuable method for scientific inquiry. By discussing role of data reuse in reference disciplines and showing how secondary analysis is understood within the IS, we argue that there is a need and great opportunity for reanalysis data originating from design experiments as a form of evaluation. With thin in mind, we provide guidance for conducting such analysis.

Call for Action: Designing for Harmony in Creative Teams

Competitive markets force diverse organizations to intensively manage innovation. Many of them set up multifunctional teams responsible for generating novel and original ideas. Such teams often face higher risk of conflicts and tensions, being an inherent part of creative processes. Impact of this phenomena on creative performance of teams, even though extensively addressed in research, remains unclarified. We approach this issue while providing a novel interpretation framework inspired by the concept of harmony in jazz improvisation. We apply it to observations made with project teams in an organizational setting, and use it to inform design of a supporting collaborative solution. We postulate the need for further work on team harmony and creativity.

Don’t be afraid! Persuasive Practices in the Wild

Advisory service encounters evolve from providing expertise to joint problem-solving. Additionally, advisees depend on persuasion, which drives them to follow the advisor’s recommendations. However, advisors can be insufficiently equipped to persuade, resulting in advisees who are incapable of action or are unmotivated. Persuasive technology (PT) research proves that technology can motivate and enable people in single-user scenarios but pays limited attention to the natural realm of persuasion: the face-to-face conversation. This paper explores how persuasive technology transforms advice giving, a collaborative scenario involving an expert and a layperson. In such scenarios, IT does not act as a persuader but can provide affordances for persuasive practices, i.e., suggest new practices or enhance existing ones for convincing the advisee without deception or enforcement. We investigate the advisory practices in 24 real burglary prevention service encounters supported by IT. The paper shows the persuasive practices emerging through appropriation of the system, the tensions that govern the adoption or transformation of specific practices and routines and it confirms that studying the use and appropriation of technology uncovers organizational conflicts and tensions affecting such fundamental aspects as the advisor’s role and job description.

Design Thinking in IS Research Projects

Many see the primary impact of Design Thinking in the area of industrial innovation. Given the engineering background of the methodology, this is definitely the most straightforward approach, with its practice-oriented nature. We claim, however, that Design Thinking—defined as the mindset as well as the toolset—can significantly contribute to the success of academic research in the Information Systems area. While building on the notion of inquiry from a philosophy of science, as well as the concept of a mindset from psychology, we offer an extended view of Design Thinking as a malleable paradigm. We argue that implementing Design Thinking phases in Information Systems research projects will contribute to a better traceability and understanding of the creative processes, as well as to the credibility of their results. We postulate that Design Thinking will also contribute to new findings, thus leveraging the knowledge contribution. We, provide proven and tested practical guidance on how Design Thinking can be embedded in research projects. While this paper primarily addresses an academic audience, practitioners and facilitators in the field of Design Thinking may benefit from a philosophical perspective on this paradigm.