Refine
Year of publication
- 2021 (4) (remove)
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (4) (remove)
Keywords
- Business Rule Bases, Inconsistency Measurement (1)
- Business Software (1)
- ERP-System (1)
- Integration (1)
- Knowledge Graph (1)
- Ontologie (1)
- analytics (1)
- business intelligence (1)
- change (1)
- digital transformation (1)
Institute
- Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik (4) (remove)
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.
The flexible integration of information from distributed and complex information systems poses a major challenge for organisations. The ontology-based information integration concept SoNBO (Social Network of Business Objects) developed and presented in this dissertation addresses these challenges. In an ontology-based concept, the data structure in the source systems (e.g. operational application systems) is described with the help of a schema (= ontology). The ontology and the data from the source systems can be used to create a (virtualised or materialised) knowledge graph, which is used for information access. The schema can be flexibly adapted to the changing needs of a company regarding their information integration. SoNBO differs from existing concepts known from the Semantic Web (OBDA = Ontology-based Data Access, EKG = Enterprise Knowledge Graph) both in the structure of the company-specific ontology (= Social Network of Concepts) as well as in the structure of the user-specific knowledge graph (= Social Network of Business Objects) and makes use of social principles (known from Enterprise Social Software). Following a Design Science Research approach, the SoNBO framework was developed and the findings documented in this dissertation. The framework provides guidance for the introduction of SoNBO in a company and the knowledge gained from the evaluation (in the company KOSMOS Verlag) is used to demonstrate its viability. The results (SoNBO concept and SoNBO framework) are based on the synthesis of the findings from a structured literature review and the investigation of the status quo of ontology-based information integration in practice: For the status quo in practice, the basic idea of SoNBO is demonstrated in an in-depth case study about the engineering office Vössing, which has been using a self-developed SoNBO application for a few years. The status quo in the academic literature is presented in the form of a structured literature analysis on ontology-based information integration approaches. This dissertation adds to theory in the field of ontology-based information integration approaches (e. g. by an evaluated artefact) and provides an evaluated artefact (the SoNBO Framework) for practice.
Within the field of Business Process Management, business rules are commonly used to model company decision logic and govern allowed company behavior. An exemplary business rule in the financial sector could be for example:
”A customer with a mental condition is not creditworthy”. Business rules are
usually created and maintained collaboratively and over time. In this setting,
modelling errors can occur frequently. A challenging problem in this context is
that of inconsistency, i.e., contradictory rules which cannot hold at the same
time. For instance, regarding the exemplary rule above, an inconsistency would
arise if a (second) modeller entered an additional rule: ”A customer with a mental condition is always creditworthy”, as the two rules cannot hold at the same
time. In this thesis, we investigate how to handle such inconsistencies in business
rule bases. In particular, we develop methods and techniques for the detection,
analysis and resolution of inconsistencies in business rule bases