Sebastian Schlauderer

Quality Marks, Metrics, and Measurement Procedures for Business Process Models

The availability of high-quality business process models is a central prerequisite for a successful process management. Nevertheless, in practice process models exhibit a large number of quality deficits, among them grammatical, content-related, and stylistic defects. In addition, there exist only very few approaches to determine the quality of business process models. In this paper, we present the 3QM-Framework, an analytical approach to systematically determine the quality of business process models. The 3QM-Framework makes three contributions: it provides quality marks, metrics, and measurement procedures to quantify the quality level as elements of a theoretically justified quality model. The applicability of the 3QM-Framework has been empirically evaluated in case studies. The results of a survey that was conducted among experts moreover attest its practical relevance.

Investigating the Long-Term Acceptance of Agile Methodologies: An Empirical Study of Developer Perceptions in Scrum Projects

Agile development methodologies have gained great interest in research and practice. As their introduction considerably changes traditional working habits of developers, the long-term acceptance of agile methodologies becomes a critical success factor. Yet, current studies primarily examine the early adoption stage of agile methodologies. To investigate the long-term acceptance, we conducted a study at a leading insurance company that introduced Scrum in 2007. Using a qualitative research design and the Diffusion of Innovations Theory as a lens for analysis, we gained in-depth insights into factors influencing the acceptance of Scrum. Particularly, developers felt Scrum to be more compatible to their actual working practices. Moreover, they perceived the use of Scrum to deliver numerous relative advantages. However, we also identified possible barriers to acceptance since developers felt both the complexity of Scrum and the required discipline to be higher in comparison with traditional development methodologies.

What Makes IT Personnel Adopt Scrum? A Framework of Drivers and Inhibitors to Developer Acceptance

In recent years, the agile Scrum methodology has become a popular software development approach. It significantly differs from traditional approaches as it promotes communication, self-organization, flexibility, and innovation instead of extensive planning and codified processes. While such a paradigm shift promises to better support the timely delivery of high-quality software in turbulent business environments, its success considerably depends on the willingness of developers to adopt the agile methodology. In this paper, we present a framework with drivers and inhibitors to the developer acceptance of Scrum. It combines analytical with empirical findings and can be used as a theoretical basis to empirically evaluate the actual support of Scrum in concrete scenarios. The introduced framework is based on the extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which has been proven to be also applicable to describe the intention of developers to use a methodology. Building upon results from qualitative in-depth interviews with six experienced Scrum experts of a German DAX-30 company, we refine the general determinants of adoption contained in the TAM with several observed factors that influence the willingness of developers to use Scrum in practice.

Alignment of Business and IT Architectures in the German Federal Government: A Systematic Method to Identify Services from Business Processes

Achieving alignment between business and IT is a top priority of information systems management. To facilitate the alignment of business and IT, enterprise architecture management frameworks have been developed. They support the coordination of various architecture types. In this paper, we focus on the alignment of the business and information systems architecture. Specifically, we present a new method to identify services from business process models. The novel contribution of our approach is to show how the business architecture can be used to drive the organization of the information systems architecture and to ensure its alignment with business requirements. The presented method was developed using a design science approach. Its applicability was evaluated in a controlled study. The evaluation results suggest that novice users are able to effectively use the method. It was furthermore perceived as useful and easy to use, which is an indicator that the proposed method will be accepted in practice.

The Market for Services: Economic Criteria, Immaturities, and Critical Success Factors

Mature service markets, which facilitate the reuse of services by efficiently coordinating service supply and demand, are a cornerstone for the breakthrough of the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm. Accordingly, the Web service technology already comprises a standard for the creation of service registries to ease the development of service marketplaces. In parallel with the increasing popularity of SOC, forecasts have moreover prophesied service marketplaces to rapidly evolve and become lucrative. Up to now, however, only very few service marketplaces emerged and managed to establish themselves. To investigate possible reasons, we analyze the structure of todays service markets against the criteria of perfect markets as benchmarks from economic theory. As a result, we identify numerous immaturities of todays service markets which are closely examined. To mitigate identified immaturities, we derive critical success factors and describe how to transform them into marketplace features. In particular, we show the resulting architecture of CompoNex - a model marketplace, which is currently being developed in a design science approach to facilitate the trading of services in todays markets.

New Vistas for Firefighter Information Systems? Towards a Systematic Evaluation of Emerging Technologies from a Task-Technology Fit Perspective

During the response to an emergency, firefighters inevitably have to make critical, context-dependent decisions on site. To improve the ability of firefighters to comprehend both the situation at hand and the capabilities of the available resources, it is frequently proposed in literature to use new and emerging information technologies to gather, share, and present real-time information in so-called on-site emergency response systems. In this paper, we present the results of a survey-based study, in which we asked representatives of German fire brigades to assess the potential of seven emerging technologies from a user-oriented task-technology fit perspective. The results indicate that digital maps, indoor navigation support, the continuous transmission of the air supply status, and integrated on-site emergency response systems indeed might have the potential to expedite the emergency response process. In contrast to the expectations, the potential of drones, on-ground robots, and intelligent clothing was found to be limited, though.

How Complete is the USDL

The USDL aims at providing comprehensive descriptions of business and software services which cover all aspects relevant to support their discovery and combination in the envisioned Internet of Services. In this chapter, we specifically evaluate the expressive power of USDL to specify software services. Based on an analysis of literature on software description requirements and related approaches, we derive a theoretically grounded evaluation framework. This framework is used as a benchmark to evaluate the constructs of the USDL. According to the presented evaluation framework, comprehensive descriptions of software services should cover commercial information, implemented business semantics, technical binding information, and service quality. The evaluation shows that the USDL provides the most detailed approach to date to comprehensively describe software services, which nevertheless should be harmonized in some aspects.

Jenseits objektorientierter Entwicklung: Systematische Identifikation von Fachkomponenten mit SOM

Bedingt durch stetig wachsende Herausforderungen ist die flexible und kostengunstige Entwicklung von Informationssystemen fur Unternehmen heutzutage von groser Bedeutung. Die systematische Ableitung und Gestaltung der Software-Bausteine eines Systems ist dabei unabdingbar. Vor dem Hintergrund der Komponentenorientierung verspricht die BCI-Methode die Identifikation geeigneter Software-Bausteine zu gewahrleisten. Die unabhangige Anwendbarkeit von der Art der zugrunde liegenden konzeptionellen Modelle erweist sich dabei als Vorteil der Methode. Da jedoch die Gute der gefundenen Losung masgeblich durch die Qualitat der Modelle determiniert ist, stellt sich die Frage nach der Eignung unterschiedlicher Modellarten. Mit der SOM-Methodik liegt ein ganzheitlicher und etablierter Ansatz zur systematischen Beschreibung des Fachkonzepts vor, welcher im Rahmen des Beitrags in Kombination mit der BCI-Methode hinsichtlich der Erlangung valider Ergebnisse untersucht wird. Im Vordergrund steht dabei insbesondere die Untersuchung, welche Modelle zu betrachten sowie welche Beziehungen zu unterscheiden sind.

Selecting Technologies for Social Commerce: Towards a Systematic Method.

Social commerce, the use of social media in e-commerce, has become increasingly popular in research and practice. As social commerce initiatives are enabled by technologies, their success considerably depends on the ability of companies to select adequate candidates from the available social commerce technologies. However, with the popularity of social commerce, the number of technologies is steadily increasing. Without guidance, the selection of technologies becomes cumbersome and risky. Moreover, while social commerce initiatives are most effective if they combine multiple different technologies, existing software selection approaches are limited to a specific technology and only support selecting one product from a set of technologically equivalent alternatives. Combining design science research with action research, we therefore propose a new method to support the selection of multiple complementary social commerce technologies. The contribution is twofold: (1) we propose a procedure model that describes the problem of selecting a set of multiple technologies as tailor-made decision-making process; (2) we introduce a technology assessment catalog as a consolidated information base to assess social commerce technologies with respect to their impact on customers’ buying behavior. The results of an evaluation in a social commerce project indicate that the method supports the selection of social commerce technologies.