Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik
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Globally billions of dollars are invested on information systems and technology (IS/IT) to achieve business change. Understanding how value is generated and captured from these investments has been a key theme in information systems (IS) research for over 25 years. However, despite significant theoretical progress, organisations are still failing to achieve the full value of their investments and identifying and realising the benefits of IS/IT-enabled business change remains a challenge for both research and practice.
Our research is concerned with the business change associated with the introduction and use of new forms of enterprise collaboration system (ECS) that incorporate social software functionality (e.g. social profiles, blogs, wikis, activity streams, collaborative tagging etc). ECS represent a significant business investment; however, there remains uncertainty around the benefits and value arising from the introduction of these new types of ECS. Existing research studies on IS/IT benefits are focused primarily on traditional enterprise systems such as ERP systems. This article summarises the existing work that directly, or indirectly addresses IS benefits, to reveal four broad themes (i) evaluations of IS/IT investments (ii) measuring IS success (iii) classifying and measuring IS benefits and (iv) benefits realisation management.
The article concludes with an overview of the research on benefits management conducted in the Center for Enterpise Information Research at the University of Koblenz and the current research project investigating the benefit of enterprise collaboration systems (BECS).
The BECS project investigates the benefits arising from the adoption and use of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS).
ECS are large-scale collaboration technology infrastructures that provide the software functionality to enable workgroups to organise online team meetings, to create and share information, to coordinate workflows and to collaborate on joint projects, regardless of the location and timing of work activities.
When ECS are introduced into organisations there are initial expectations about what can be gained from the system, e.g. improved collaboration, improved communication across silos, etc. Over time, as users gain experience using the system, ideas about what can be achieved change and the ECS become embedded into organisational work practices. However, identifying and understanding the expected benefits of ECS, how they evolve over time, and how they contribute to organisational performance is challenging due to a lack of suitable methods and tools to describe (profile), measure and monitor ECS benefits.
The BECS project addresses this challenge; the primary focus is on identifying, measuring and monitoring the benefits that arise from ECS implementation and use over time. Through the development of in-depth longitudinal case studies of ECS adoption in leading organisations in the DACH region and empirical analyses of collaboration system use, the research:
i) developed practical tools and methods for the measurement of ECS benefits and benefits profiling;
ii) provides greater insights into how benefits management is experienced and constituted in practice; and
iii) developed a novel and integrated framework that assists researchers and practitioners to coordinate their efforts in developing, implementing and evaluating ECS benefits.
The project delivered both practical and theoretical outcomes. The methods and tools developed in the BECS project have been applied in organisations and delivered useful and useable results enabling organisations to understand and monitor the evolving benefits of their ECS. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, this work became of even greater importance as new uses of ECS emerged when organisations adopted large-scale support for hybrid and remote working initiatives.
The research findings also provide key theoretical concepts and analytical methods, including the MoBeC framework, Social Collaboration Analytics and Benefits Scorecards. These provide the foundation for subse-quent research projects to examine transformation to digital work and the development of a new stream of research into trace analysis and collaboration analytics more broadly.
The digital transformation of the public sector and the development of suitable implementation mechanisms are currently major challenges in the area of E-Government. While Germany is one of the leading countries in the private sector in terms of digital offerings, the digital transformation processes in the public sector are progressing only slowly. In particular, compared to other European countries, German administrations offer few digital and interoperable services, which prevents them from catching up with a government-wide dig-ital transformation.
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the reasons for the slow progress of digital transformation in the public sector and to understand why Germany is not making significant progress in the digitization of administrative services compared to other European member states. Furthermore, it aims to gradually build a comprehensive understanding of why digital transformation is not being driven, supported or applied in the public sector and what positive or negative factors ultimately prevent cross-organizational exchange.
The focus of this dissertation is on organizational and interdisciplinary collaboration in socio-technical systems and its influence on the digital transformation of public administrations. The investigation of science and practice is based on the principles of qualitative social research and qualitative content analysis according to Mayring. Deductive categories are systematically derived and supplemented by further inductive categories along the empirical investigation in the five case studies.
The identified phenomena are analyzed in a scientific explanatory model and described with the help of the holistic approach and the actor-network theory. On this basis, solutions are developed that can either prevent or at least reduce the influencing factors. An interdiscipli-nary approach that combines theoretical foundations from business informatics, administrative informatics/e-government and organizational science not only creates a comprehensive understanding of the problem, but also develops approaches for the scientific description of informatics phenomena with the help of social constructivist approaches.
The literature contains very few publications on the application of Process Mining methods for the analysis of event logs in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). This is not surprising because the analysis of digital support for collaborative work is extremely intricate due to various challenges relating to a lack of data access, poor data quality, unstructured processes and a lack of descriptive models. This article reports on the findings from an Action Design Research (ADR) project. The ADR team had access to a large instance of an operational ECS with more than 3000 users. The event log contains several million entries. Together with the platform’s operating team, intensive research was carried out over a period of six years on ways of analysing user activities on the platform. Several cycles were run to develop new methods and computational techniques to decipher the event logs and meaningfully describe the processes recorded in them. Thanks to the close collaboration between the researchers and the operators of the collaboration platform, it was possible to compare the real-world processes carried out in the platform with the processes discovered using a novel method for Social Process Mining (SPM). The result is a pattern analysis that discovers patterns in processes that have a high degree of correspondence with the real-world scenes of collaborative work. The research work has now reached a point where other software products are included (multi-system analysis) and a catalogue of collaborative work situations (scenes) has been developed to describe the process patterns that result from the Process Mining and graph-based analysis techniques.
Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) sind essentielle Werkzeuge für die Unterstützung der digitalen Zusammenarbeit und ad hoc Projektarbeit in Unternehmen. Mit der zunehmenden Nutzung von ECS steigen auch die Bedeutung und der Bedarf an Analysen zur Schaffung eines verbesserten Verständnisses von digitaler Arbeit. Da Kollaboration sich regelmäßig über mehr als ein System erstreckt, stellt die Heterogenität der Daten verschiedener Systeme für Analysen eine Herausforderung dar, insbesondere weil plattformübergreifende Nutzungsmuster nicht ohne Weiteres nachverfolgbar und vergleichbar sind. Daher wurde die „Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology“ (ColActDOnt) entwickelt, um Konzepte aus ECS (z. B. Events und Dokumente) einheitlich zu beschreiben. Basierend auf der ColActDOnt wurde ein Datastore implementiert, in welchem die Daten verschiedener Systeme in der Struktur der Ontologie gespeichert werden. Durch den ontologiebasierten Datastore stehen die Daten für Analysen in einheitlicher Form zur Verfügung. In die Datenebene wurden Daten aus dem ECS HCL Connections (CNX), welches somit das initiale Quellsystem darstellt, importiert. Mittels der ColActDOnt wurde außerdem eine abstrakte Ontologieebene mit den Elementen der Ontologie geschaffen. Die Elemente beider Ebenen sind über Beziehungen innerhalb einer Graphdatenbank miteinander und untereinander verknüpft.
Der ontologiebasierte Datenzugriff ermöglicht es dem Benutzer ohne Kenntnisse über die Datenstrukturen des Quellsystems, lediglich mit Domänenwissen über die ColActDOnt, Inhalte abzufragen.
Der Datastore ist als Graphdatenbank (Neo4j) implementiert und somit können Abfragen nativ als Graphenstrukturen visualisiert werden. Weiterhin kann der Prototyp an Business Intelligence Tools wie Microsoft PowerBI angebunden werden und bietet somit die Möglichkeit für tiefergehende Analysen. Die erste Version des Datastores stellt einen wichtigen Schritt in Richtung der Harmonisierung von Trace Data aus ECS dar. In Zukunft sollen weitere Kollaborationssysteme an den Datastore angeschlossen werden, um systemübergreifende Analysen von komplexen Kollaborationsplattformen zu ermöglichen.
Predictive Process Monitoring is becoming more prevalent as an aid for organizations to support their operational processes. However, most software applications available today require extensive technical know-how by the operator and are therefore not suitable for most real-world scenarios. Therefore, this work presents a prototype implementation of a Predictive Process Monitoring dashboard in the form of a web application. The system is based on the PPM Camunda Plugin presented by Bartmann et al. (2021) and allows users to easily create metrics, visualizations to display these metrics, and dashboards in which visualizations can be arranged. A usability test is with test users of different computer skills is conducted to confirm the application’s user-friendliness.
Remote Working Study 2022
(2022)
The Remote Working Study 2022 is focused on the transition to work from home (WFH) triggered by the stay at home directives of 2020. These directives required employees to work in their private premises wherever possible to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus. The study, conducted by the Center for Enterprise Information Research (CEIR) at the University of Koblenz from December 2021 to January 2022, explores the transition to remote working.
The objective of the survey is to collect baseline information about organisations’ remote work experiences during and immediately following the COVID-19 lockdowns. The survey was completed by the key persons responsible for the implementation and/or management of the digital workplace in 19 German and Swiss organisations.
The data presented in this report was collected from member organisations of the IndustryConnect initiative. IndustryConnect is a university-industry research programme that is coordinated by researchers from the University of Koblenz. It focuses on research in the areas of the digital workplace and enterprise collaboration technologies, and facilitates the generation of new research insights and the exchange of experiences among user companies.
Advanced Auditing of Inconsistencies in Declarative Process Models using Clustering Algorithms
(2021)
To have a compliant business process of an organization, it is essential to ensure a onsistent process. The measure of checking if a process is consistent or not depends on the business rules of a process. If the process adheres to these business rules, then the process is compliant and efficient. For huge processes, this is quite a challenge. Having an inconsistency in a process can yield very quickly to a non-functional process, and that’s a severe problem for organizations. This thesis presents a novel auditing approach for handling inconsistencies from a post-execution perspective. The tool identifies the run-time inconsistencies and visualizes them in heatmaps. These plots aim to help modelers observe the most problematic constraints and help them make the right remodeling decisions. The modelers assisted with many variables can be set in the tool to see a different representation of heatmaps that help grasp all the perspectives of the problem. The heatmap sort and shows the run-time inconsistency patterns, so that modeler can decide which constraints are highly problematic and should address a re-model. The tool can be applied to real-life data sets in a reasonable run-time.
Enterprise collaboration platforms are increasingly gaining importance in organisations. Integrating groupware functionality and enterprise social software (ESS), they have substantially been transforming everyday work in organisations. While traditional collaboration systems have been studied in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for many years, the large-scale, infrastructural and heterogeneous nature of enterprise collaboration platforms remains uncharted. Enterprise collaboration platforms are embedded into organisations’ digital workplace and come with a high degree of complexity, ambiguity, and generativity. When introduced, they are empty shells with no pre-determined purposes of use. They afford interpretive flexibility, and thus are shaping and being shaped by and in their social context. Outcomes and benefits emerge and evolve over time in an open-ended process and as the digital platform is designed through use. In order to make the most of the platform and associated continuous digital transformation, organisations have to develop the necessary competencies and capabilities.
Extant literature on enterprise collaboration platforms has proliferated and provide valuable insights on diverse topics, such as implementation strategies, adoption hurdles, or collaboration use cases, however, they tend to disregard their evolvability and related multiple time frames and settings. Thus, this research aims to identify, investigate, and theorise the ways that enterprise collaboration platforms are changing over time and space and the ways that organisations build digital transformation capabilities. To address this research aim two different case study types are conducted: i) in-depth longitudinal qualitative case study, where case narratives and visualisations capturing hard-to-summarise complexities in the enterprise collaboration platform evolution are developed and ii) multiple-case studies to capture, investigate, and compare cross-case elements that contribute to the shaping of enterprise collaboration platforms in different medium-sized and large organisations from a range of industries. Empirical data is captured and investigated through a multi-method research design (incl. focus groups, surveys, in-depth interviews, literature reviews, qualitative content analysis, descriptive statistics) with shifting units of analysis. The findings reveal unique change routes with unanticipated outcomes and transformations, context-specific change strategies to deal with multiple challenges (e.g. GDPR, works council, developments in the technological field, competing systems, integration of blue-collar workers), co-existing platform uses, and various interacting actors from the immediate setting and broader context. The interpretation draws on information infrastructure (II) as a theoretical lens and related sociotechnical concepts and perspectives (incl. inscriptions, social worlds, biography of artefacts). Iteratively, a conceptual model of the building of digital transformation capabilities is developed, integrating the insights gained from the study of enterprise collaboration platform change and developed monitoring change tools (e.g. MoBeC framework). It assists researchers and practitioners in understanding the building of digital transformation capabilities from a theoretical and practical viewpoint and organisations implement the depicted knowledge in their unique digital transformation processes.
Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS) have become substantial for computer-mediated communication and collaboration among employees in organisations. As ECS combine features from social media and traditional groupware, a growing number of organisations implement ECS to facilitate collaboration among employees. Consequently, ECS form the core of the digital workplace. Thus, the activity logs of ECS are particularly valuable since they provide a unique opportunity for observing and analysing collaboration in the digital workplace.
Evidence from academia and practice demonstrates that there is no standardised approach for the analysis of ECS logs and that practitioners struggle with various barriers. Because current ECS analytics tools only provide basic features, academics and practitioners cannot leverage the full potential of the activity logs. As ECS activity logs are a valuable source for understanding collaboration in the digital workplace, new methods and metrics for their analysis are required. This dissertation develops Social Collaboration Analytics (SCA) as a method for measuring and analysing collaboration activities in ECS. To address the existing limitations in academia and practice and to contribute a method and structures for applying SCA in practice, this dissertation aims to answer two main research questions:
1. What are the current practices for measuring collaboration activities in Enterprise Collaboration Systems?
2. How can Social Collaboration Analytics be implemented in practice?
By answering the research questions, this dissertation seeks to (1) establish a broad thematic understanding of the research field of SCA and (2) to develop SCA as a structured method for analysing ac-tivity logs of ECS. As part of the first research question, this dissertation documents the status quo of SCA in the academic literature and practice. By answering the second research question, this dissertation contributes the SCA framework (SCAF), which guides the practical application of SCA. SCAF is the main contribution of this dissertation. The framework was developed based on findings from an analysis of 86 SCA studies, results from 6 focus groups and results from a survey among 27 ECS user companies. The phases of SCAF were derived from a comparison of established process models for data mining and business intelligence. The eight phases of the framework contain detailed descriptions, working steps, and guiding questions, which provide a step by step guide for the application of SCA in practice. Thus, academics and practitioners can benefit from using the framework.
The constant evaluation of the research outcomes in focus groups ensures both rigour and relevance. This dissertation employs a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods approach. As part of the university-industry collaboration initiative IndustryConnect, this research has access to more than 30 leading ECS user companies. Being built on a key case study and a series of advanced focus groups with representatives of user companies, this dissertation can draw from unique insights from practice as well as rich data with a longitudinal perspective.