Tomi Dahlberg

Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review

The mobile payment services markets are currently under transition with a history of numerous tried and failed solutions, and a future of promising but yet uncertain possibilities with potential new technology innovations. At this point of the development, we take a look at the current state of the mobile payment services market from a literature review perspective. We review prior literature on mobile payments, analyze the various factors that impact mobile payment services markets, and suggest directions for future research in this still emerging field. To facilitate the analysis of literature, we propose a framework of four contingency and five competitive force factors, and organize the mobile payment research under the proposed framework. Consumer perspective of mobile payments as well as technical security and trust are best covered by contemporary research. The impacts of social and cultural factors on mobile payments, as well as comparisons between mobile and traditional payment services are entirely uninvestigated issues. Most of the factors outlined by the framework have been addressed by exploratory and early phase studies.

An Integrated Framework for IT Governance and the Development and Validation of an Assessment Instrument

Our paper presents a new IT governance framework and introduces an assessment tool designed to measure its effectiveness. The framework builds on the integration between the structural and processes perspectives of IT governance, business-IT alignment, and senior executives’ needs. The framework is aimed to help board members, general managers, business line and IT executives to understand, measure, and manage IT governance in their respective organizations as a part of corporate governance. In the paper, special attention is paid to the conceptual validation of the framework and respective assessment instrument.

A New Instrument to Measure the Success of IT Outsourcing

IT outsourcing has changed fundamentally since its start in the 1960’s. Since IT outsourcing services evolve and expand continuously, instruments to evaluate outsourcing success in user organizations need to be modified to meet these changes. Our study develops and conceptually validates a coherent and meaningful new instrument to measure the success of IT outsourcing. The instrument combines strategic, economic, technical and social success factors. The instrument is offered to researchers to be used in future studies. Correspondingly, our instrument provides practitioners with a useful tool to use in setting goals for IT outsourcing and for evaluating their achievement.

IT Governance Maturity and IT Outsourcing Degree: An Exploratory Study

The generic rationale of IT governance and IT outsourcing is similar. Both aim to increase business value delivery from IT. This article examines empirically how IT governance maturity evaluations of 109 senior executives in 20 enterprises differ, between those enterprises that have outsourced their IT function selectively and those enterprises that have conducted total outsourcing of their IT function. We collected survey data with an instrument, which builds on a generic IT governance framework and measures IT governance maturity. The article also evaluates whether the survey instrument is applicable to research that compares selective versus total outsourcing in the context of IT governance. In statistical analysis, we found several differences between selective and total IT outsourcers

Digital Supply Chain Transformation toward Blockchain Integration

Digital supply chain integration is becoming increasingly dynamic. Access to customer demand needs to be shared effectively, and product and service deliveries must be tracked to provide visibility in the supply chain. Business process integration is based on standards and reference architectures, which should offer end-to-end integration of product data. Companies operating in supply chains establish process and data integration through the specialized intermediate companies, whose role is to establish interoperability by mapping and integrating companyspecific data for various organizations and systems. This has typically caused high integration costs, and diffusion is slow. This paper investigates the requirements and functionalities of supply chain integration. Cloud integration can be expected to offer a cost-effective business model for interoperable digital supply chains. We explain how supply chain integration through the blockchain technology can achieve disruptive transformation in digital supply chains and networks.

Lost Opportunity Why Has Dominant Design Failed to Emerge for the Mobile Payment Services Market in Finland

The approximately 10 year history of mobile payment services is characterized by numerous failures and promising but yet uncertain future. Against this background we take a look at why a dominant design has not emerged for this payment services market in Finland, despite dozens of efforts and continuous user interest even when necessary technologies, competencies, attitudes, regulation and opportunities have existed. We developed a multidisciplinary framework to answer this question. The framework integrates the constructs and findings of earlier research on the emergence of dominant designs with the findings of the case, for which data was collected over five years. We also extended earlier research by analyzing the issue from the era of ferment to present.

Is Transaction Cost Economics Theory Able to Explain Contracts Used for and Success of Firm-Wide IT-Infrastructure Outsourcing?

Transaction cost economics (TCE) is much used in outsourcing research. We applied two TCE attributes - asset specificity and frequency - to characterise IT infrastructure services and to indicate what type of outsourcing contracts should be concluded. We classified outsourcing contracts of 213 enterprises to determine if TCE contracting recommendations were followed, and if outsourcing succeeded better when the contract type matched the IT infrastructure service characteristics. Results reveal that enterprises do not follow TCE contract recommendations. They probably should. In application services the match of contract type and service characteristics was positively related to absolute IT outsourcing success

Longitudinal Study on the Expectations of Cloud Computing Benefits and an Integrative Multilevel Model for Understanding Cloud Computing Performance

Cloud computing, a term introduced ten years ago, has proliferated rapidly both in developed and developing economies. Benefit expectations have impacted the rapid usage increase of this technology. We investigated with a five-year longitudinal survey changes in the expectations regarding cloud computing. We also crafted an integrated multilevel model to understand how cloud expectations and cloud readiness influence cloud computing deployment and performance combined with five IT business value (ITBV) factors. We tested empirically the crafted hypotheses and the research model using survey data collected from approximately 200+200 randomly selected business and IT executives in 2014 and 2015. Empirical results confirmed that our research model explained approximately one half of cloud computing performance for both years.

The creation of inter-organisational IT governance for social welfare and healthcare IT - lessons from a case study

Social welfare and healthcare professionals consider their services fragmented, which also impacts information technology IT deployment. They also face the question of whether to cooperate with other organisations in IT. The need to cooperate and to organise cooperation has increased with ever-wider IT deployment. Governance of IT helps in this by defining the responsibilities of cooperating organisations. Improved data sharing and the pooling of developments and purchases are among the envisioned benefits. This article depicts the theoretical basis of inter-organisational IT governance arrangements against the background of a case engaging over 100 organisations. The lessons of the case, including a survey involving 68 experts, suggest that a perceived need to cooperate to achieve concrete benefits and governance principles are necessary to establish inter-organisational IT governance. The findings of this research augment the knowledge base of IT governance with constructs taken from the resource-based view RBV, transaction cost economics TCE, and social network theories.

Towards an Integrative, Multilevel Theory for Managing the Direct and Indirect Impacts of IT Project Success Factors

Practitioners and researchers have identified numerous variables that impact IT project success. Rather than adding new variables, we attempted to reduce them to a more generic model. First, we identified potential factors, hypothesized about the relationships between the factors and then integrated the hypotheses into a research model. In addition to project level factors, we identified IT, business, and environment level factors. The model is thus multilevel but also integrative as it hypothesizes about the relation-ships between the model factors. Finally, we empirically evaluated the hypotheses and the research model. We used survey data of 249 CxOs for the empirical evaluation. Results confirmed that the research model factors contributed directly and indirectly on the success of IT projects. According to our findings, a favorable financial situation, highly-perceived importance of IT, and good IT and IT project competencies have especially significant positive impacts on IT project success.