Till J. Winkler

Municipal benefits of participatory urban sensing: a simulation approach and case validation

Involving citizens in public affairs through the use of participatory sensing applications is an emerging theme in Pervasive Computing and mobile E-Government (M-Government). Prior work, however, suggests that local governments place more emphasis on internal than on external M-Government projects. This paper takes an action design research perspective to provide insight into the often overlooked potential of citizen-centric, external M-Government services. We consider the scenario of a sensing application for reporting urban infrastructure issues to the municipality and present a System Dynamics model to estimate the diffusion, use, and municipal impacts of such service. The model is validated based on the case of a large German city, a dedicated survey, and further data sources. The simulation results indicate that, compared to internal information acquisition procedures, the use of urban sensing can improve a municipalitys availability of environmental information at a comparable level of cost. Furthermore, we discuss a number of aspects and learnings related to an urban sensing implementation and provide an empirical estimation of the diffusion model. Our results provide an impetus for researchers and government practitioners to reconsider the benefits of urban sensing applications in E-Government endeavors.

Information technology governance and innovation adoption in varying organizational contexts

This cumulative dissertation contributes to the question of the theoretical relationship between information technology (IT) governance and the adoption of IT-based innovations. IT governance has been described specifically as the locus of responsibility for IT functions within organizations. Innovation adoption in this context refers to the decision of an organization to make use of a technological innovation. Two principal research questions (RQ) guide this dissertation: (1) how does the mode of IT governance influence adoption of new technologies, and conversely (2) how does the adoption of new technologies affect organizational IT governance? In order to address RQ1, I conducted four studies in a public sector context regarding innovations in Mobile Government (M-Government) referring to the use of mobile technology to improve government services and internal processes. In a survey with 50 German municipalities, I investigated the strategic motivations for adopting a broad range of emerging M-Government services. The results indicate that municipal governments take a different pace in IT-based innovation adoption and therefore can be described by clusters of “Innovators”, “IT experienced”, “Efficiencyoriented” and “Laggards” (Chapter 4.1). By an in-depth analysis of interview data from 12 municipalities, I derive a well-grounded framework of drivers and inhibitors of M-Government adoption. Furthermore, based on cross-case analysis, I provide empirical evidence that the mode of IT governance—more precisely, the question of whether responsibilities for IT and organization are effectively aligned—is a crucial prerequisite to foster innovation adoption in public sector organizations. The findings also show why most municipalities focus on internal M-Government innovations (Chapter 4.2). For this reason, I examined M-Government adoption on the citizen level in a survey with more than 200 participants. The model tests indicate that external M-Government services, such as urban sensing, are also effective means to enable more citizen participation, while perceived privacy risks are not major inhibitors (Chapter 4.3). Finally, applying a simulation approach and a case validation, I demonstrate that such services can improve a municipality’s level of environmental information at comparable cost to internal information acquisition procedures and— in this sense—simultaneously allow for implementing service and process innovations (Chapter 4.4). Regarding RQ2, I consider the adoption of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS). In this context, it is hypothesized that for some applications SaaS-based provision leads to a ‘governance shift’ of IT responsibilities from IT towards business units. Based on an in-depth analysis of four cases of SaaS adoption, I take a multiplecontingency perspective to isolate the factors that potentially influence the allocation of application governance (Chapter 5.1). An operationalization and test of the proposed contingency model in a survey with 207 large firms reveals, that responsibility for SaaS-based applications is indeed allocated more frequently to business units. Drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives, this can be (partly) explained by a smaller scope of the use of SaaS-based applications and the changing competency requirements for SaaS-based delivery. However, the locus of the initiative emerges as the most determining factor for explaining application governance (Chapter 5.3). Recognizing the inherent limitations of a factor-based approach, two cases of SaaS adoption are compared in detail by applying a process-theoretic paradigm. Here the

Special Section: The Transformative Value of Cloud Computing: A Decoupling, Platformization, and Recombination Theoretical Framework

ALEXANDER BENLIAN (benlian@ise.tu-darmstadt.de; corresponding author) is a Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, where he serves as Dean of the Department of Business, Economics, and Law. His former academic position was Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, where he received a Ph.D. He has also served as a senior consultant with McKinsey & Company. Dr. Benlian’s research interests include the transformative value of cloud computing, online platforms, digital transformation, and digital business models, with over 150 academic publications in these areas. His work has appeared in Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the AIS, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, and others. He is Associate Editor of the European Journal of Information Systems and International Journal of Electronic Commerce and serves the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Service Research.

SELFSURVEY.ORG: A PLATFORM FOR PREDICTION- BASED BENCHMARKING AND FEEDBACK-ENABLED SURVEY RESEARCH

This design research builds on the idea to combine the strengths of traditional survey research with a more practice-oriented benchmarking approach. We present selfsurvey.org, an online survey platform that allows providing instant and respondent-specific feedback based on a scientifically grounded research model and a structural equation model-based prediction technique. Based on the partial least squares analysis results of a training dataset, selfsurvey employs a scoring algorithm to derive respondent-specific predicted scores, compares these with the observed scores, and provides visualized and text-based outputs. Our evaluation of selfsurvey in the context of a maturity benchmarking study provides an indication for the perceived usefulness of this artifact and its underlying scoring algorithm. We argue that this prediction-based approach, which goes far beyond the functionality of common univariate benchmarking tools, can be used for a wide range of survey studies and help increase the perceived relevance of academic survey studies to practice.