List of Abstracts

An instrument for evaluating data-driven traffic management applications in the context of digital transformation towards a smart city

• The smart city concept represents an integrated approach for mitigating the challenges resulting from ongoing urbanization by synergizing technology, data, and citizens in a sustainable manner. Smart mobility is an important aspect of a smarty city with intelligent traffic management as one of its key enablers that can contribute to making cities more attractive for living. In this article we focus on data-driven applications for traffic management and develop a new instrument for their evaluation, sharing insights from a municipal project. Drawing on digital business research, evaluation models and expertise from traffic management, we develop criteria and apply them to a Weighted Sum Model, an established modeling technique. As a result, we obtain an easy-to-use instrument for evaluating data-driven applications that can also be adjusted to other contexts. Therefore, both our instrument and the process we employed in its development can support future smart city initiatives in their instrument development and evaluation process.

Overcoming Barriers to Digital Transformation – Development of a Decision Matrix

• Digital Transformation (DT) impacts industries, non-profit sectors, higher education, and even societies. As connectivity technologies blend with physical assets, modifications in value creation processes are provoked. These modifications may have positive impacts such as higher effectivity, enhanced business models, and improved customer connection. However, realizing a DT is a complex endeavor. Specific properties, so-called barriers, hinder the DT journey. Thus, it is essential to grasp the barriers and indicate ways to overcome them. We develop a decision matrix for overcoming barriers using qualitative data from participants working in different sectors. This work builds upon a pre-study developing a barrier classification and enhances it with specific recommendations such as “define clear DT responsibilities”. Thus, our work takes the development of plain barrier classifications further. From a theoretical perspective, this work contributes to developing hypothetical models of the effects of recommendations to overcome barriers in the future. From a practical perspective, companies can use the recommendations to plan actions to take.

Digital Twin Ecosystems: Potential Stakeholders and Their Requirements

• Context: As industries are heading for digital transformation through Industry 4.0, the concept of Digital Twin (DT) - a software for digital transformation, has become popular. Many industries use DT for its advantages, such as predictive maintenance and real-time remote monitoring. Within DT domain, an emerging topic is the concept of an ecosystem—a digital platform that would create value for different stakeholders in an ecosystem of DT-driven products and services. The identification of potential stakeholders and their requirements provides valuable contributions to the development of healthy Digital Twin Ecosystems (DTE). However, current empirical knowledge of potential stakeholders and their requirements are limited.
  Objective/Methodology: Thus, the objective of this research was to explore potential stakeholders and their requirements. The research employed an empirical research methodology in which semi-structured interviews were conducted with DT professionals for data collection.
  Results: Data analysis of the study revealed 13 potential stakeholders who were categorized as primary (manufacturers, suppliers, subcontractors, and intelligent robots), secondary (maintenance service providers, platform integration service providers, tech companies, etc.), and tertiary (research organizations, third-party value-added service providers, cyber security firms, etc.). This study also presents the different requirements of these stakeholders in detail.
  Contribution: The study contributes to both research and industry by identifying possible stakeholders and their requirements. It contributes to the literature by adding new knowledge on DTEs and fills a research gap while contributing industry by providing ample knowledge to the industry’s practitioners that is useful in the development and maintenance of a healthy DTE.

Definition of the enterprise integration platforms as a service — Towards a common understanding

• Integration platforms are modern way to governance, develop and deploy integrations, the connections and data transferring between systems. Integration platforms can be build as an in-house solution, but nowadays the more common way is to buy enterprise integration platforms as a service (EiPaaS/iPaaS) product. However, integration platforms are evolving fast and in our literature review we found out that the definition in the academic research about enterprise integration platforms as a service is outdated. For that, we created a new definition to describe more the capabilities, importance and evolution of enterprise integration platforms as a service by analyzing the leading EiPaaS product descriptions. Our results helps academics and companies gain further understanding about the enterprise integration platforms as a service solutions.

Roadmapping in the Digital Transformation Literature

• Digital transformation is vital for organizations in all sectors, as it changes value creation, customer relationships, and internal processes. A key concern in digital transformations is creating and executing an effective strategy that reimagines the organization. However, structured approaches for reimagination in a digital transformation are still missing. This paper contributes to this concern by reviewing how roadmapping is used in the digital transformation literature. Roadmapping is a flexible technique to support the strategic formulation of short- and long-range changes to software, business, organizational and structural aspects. Reviewing 28 papers on digital transformation, we uncovered five types of roadmapping for reimagining organizations: Product-Technology, Strategy, Business, Data, and Design. For these five types, we unfold the landscape of obstacles, opportunities, and context for different pathways to successfully reimagining organizations in digital transformations

A Systematic Mapping Study of Empirical Research Methods in Software Ecosystems

• The field of software ecosystems is rapidly maturing and significant numbers of articles are published each year to further develop our understanding of this concept and support innovation through it. The growth of the field also brings along challenges, such as findability and reusability of research results, coordination of research initiatives, and significant review pressure on members of the community. In this mapping study of empirical research methods in the field, we show that few studies do a good job of reporting their research methods and results. Using data from the study, we provide guidelines for performing empirical research in software ecosystems.

Interrelation of Digitalization and Digital Transformation in a Maritime company

• Many organizations must undergo digitalization and digital transformation (DT) simultaneously; in itself, either is daunting. For 15 months, we followed the ongoing digitalization and DT activities at a maritime company with over 3700 employees through a qualitative analysis of 20 interviews, a workshop, and several documents. We see how digitalization and DT are inherently interrelated; DT and digitalization have common enablers through technology such as AI, and common processes in continuous software development. They also share many challenges, including lack of resources and internal resistance against change. Through acquiring data in the digitalization of core services, companies can undergo DT by utilizing data in new and profound ways to build services with new value propositions. In conclusion, digitalization and DT are necessary for incumbent companies and require careful balancing of resources, competence, and technology

Where Does This Feature Belong To? Locating Businessto-Business Features in a Platform Ecosystem

• The question of how software development needs are channeled into different parts of a platform ecosystem has been addressed by separating owners and complementors and by separating the core and the periphery. This is not necessarily sufficient in business-to-business ecosystems due to their characteristics. Our grounded theory study observes a B2B platform that brings together multiple stakeholders and their software development. This paper describes the location aspect in decision making, what feature gets implemented in which part of the ecosystem and on what grounds. We refer to this decision of implementation location as feature demarcation. We describe the related structures and discuss why the location matters. Our work complements the existing research with an addition to the core-periphery view. In the process of situating a new feature we observe the architectural elements together instead of focusing on distinct entities.

The Role of Actors in Platform Ecosystems: A Systematic Literature Review and Comparison Across Platform

• The information systems literature has acknowledged the importance of external actors for the success of platform ecosystems. Thus far, these actors have either been studied on a particular platform type or have been generalized across multiple platform types. We see opportunities in scrutinizing the varying roles that actors play on platforms of different types. For instance, actors who develop third-party applications are hardly comparable to actors that sell physical goods on an electronic marketplace. We conducted a systematic literature review and compared actors and their activities across different platform types. Specifically, we analyzed 68 scientific studies and distilled five platform types: social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, sharing platforms, crowdsourcing platforms, and software platforms. Next, we analyzed the actors that engage on those platforms and found that each platform type is associated with a specific set of actors: e-commerce platforms involve sellers and buyers, sharing platforms involve lenders and borrowers, crowdsourcing platforms involve workers and crowdsourcers and software platforms involve application developers and users. On social media platforms, actors occupy a double role as prosumers. Additionally, we investigated the interactions between these actor types and found that same-side interactions are especially prevalent among application developers who share knowledge with one another. The main contribution of our study is a comparative overview on platform types, actors and activities.

Towards understanding how software startups deal with UX from customer and user information

• Customer-centric strategies can help startups move towards successful and sustainable businesses. User eXperience (UX) has been considered a critical factor in creating value for the customers and users of startups. Software startups often collect data about the experience with the product from users. However, obtaining valuable insights to improve the UX from customer and user information can be challenging for startup professionals. In this paper, we present a multiple-case study conducted with Brazilian software startups in which we investigated how these companies deal with customer and user information. To collect data, we conducted semi-structured interviews and retrospective meetings with 28 professionals from the four startups. We found that the startups still need to improve their strategies to leverage customer and user information insights for continuous product improvement, including improving communication channels and adopting metrics to assess customer value creation and product success. As a result, this study can motivate startup professionals to reflect on the most efficient practices for collecting and managing UX information to improve their products and measure value creation.

The Evolution of Software Startup Research: A Survey of Literature

• The software startup research area has grown rapidly in the recent years. It is widely known that building software startups are challenging endeavors, and the failure rate is high. However, the fascinating phenomenon keeps getting interest from academics to address those challenges, due to the potential of software startups as an effective way for disruptive innovation. The aim of this study is to provide an update on the evolution of the software startup research area through a systematic mapping study. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we provide a mapping of current research in software startups in terms of contributing disciplines and research methods and theories used. The second contribution is the identification of two new and emerging research streams termed Software Startup Education and Ethics in Software Startups. Furthermore, the findings allow us to update the research agenda and provide new examples of research questions to advance the software startup research area.

On the Characteristics of Internal Software Startups

• In recent years, more attention has been given to internal software startups in practice and in research alike, yet the concept is not fully understood. Nor is it clear whether or not it significantly differs from stand-alone software startup, and if yes, then how. In this position paper, we propose to conceptualize internal software startups as a hybrid of two related concepts: stand-alone software startup and internal corporate venture (ICV). We derive characteristics of the both concepts from the earlier literature and use our previous research on internal software startups to uncover the differences and the similarities across the three concepts.

On the Compliance of Platforms with Children’s Privacy and Protection Requirements - An Analysis of TikTok

• During Covid-19 pandemic, social media platforms such as Youtube Kids and TikTok perceived a growing audience, as their videos became part of child and preteen culture. However, the children’s lack of digital literacy limits their understanding of privacy-related risks on these platforms. Besides, the misleading design of platforms services (e.g. features that favour advertising partners and retain young audiences in the ecosystem) together with limited enforcement of policies and terms of use by tech companies affect children’s protection. This paper presents 18 legal requirements (LR) for children’s privacy and protection by platforms. We illustrate their application by examining TikTok, the most popular social media platform among children. We collected TikTok’s documentation and evidence from relevant media and IT news websites to classify the compliance of its practices with these LR, which can guide platforms in implementing children’s privacy and data protection

Democratizing Software Development: A Systematic Multivocal Literature Review and Research Agenda on Citizen Development

• While the ongoing digital transformation is boosting the demand for digital solutions and digital skills, organizations worldwide experience a shortage of IT professionals and particularly software developers. At the same time, the increasing prevalence of low-code development platforms (LCDP) allows organizations to introduce citizen development initiatives to promote and accelerate their digital transformations. Citizen development represents a novel software engineering paradigm which enables and supports the development of software by non-IT professionals, consequently referred to as ‘citizen developers’. While there is a vivid discourse on citizen development in the practice community, research on this phenomenon is still scarce. We conducted a systematic multivocal literature review including research and practice publications, and identified six key themes: 1) definition and characteristics of citizen development, 2) enablers and expected benefits of citizen development, 3) challenges of and criticism towards citizen development, 4) citizen development strategy and implementation, 5) citizen development governance, and 6) citizen developers’ profiles and skills. Moreover, we propose a research agenda for future work on citizen development. Our research contribution is to synthesize the existing knowledge on citizen development and to point out future avenues to propel research on this emerging and contemporary phenomenon

Management Accounting Concepts for Inner Source Software Engineering

• Inner source software development is the use of open source development’s best practices inside a company. In inner source, developers collaborate on reusable software components across company-internal organizational silo boundaries for mutual benefit. As such, inner source goes against the grain of traditional management techniques. In this article, we present two conceptual models of management accounting for inner source. We derived these prototypes by performing a literature review and triangulating the results with interviews of industry practitioners. We demonstrate how the conceptual models can be used for monitoring and controlling inner source projects and to determine their future viability.

DevOps challenges in organizations: Through professional lens

• DevOps is a set of organizational practices as well as a culture which tries to eliminate the barriers between the Devs and Ops teams, improve the collaboration and communication among teammates. DevOps is used in different organizations because it supports quicker production, stability and reliability for software development. While the success factors of DevOps adoption have been studied in the extant literature, also the perceived challenges that a company faces during the adoption are crucial to discover. This paper explores and highlights these challenges through an open ended survey (N=15) and in-depth interviews with DevOps professionals (N=16). According to the findings, there are various challenges while implementing DevOps in the organizations. The research suggests that (i) lack of team coordination, (ii) risky change and development, (iii) team members expertise level, (iv) lack of focus or differences in development, (v) test and production environment, (vi) poorly defined functional and technical requirements, (vii) poor integration and test process, (viii) pipeline execution problems, (ix) tools integration challenges, (x) people challenges and silo-ed thinking, (xi) debugging challenges due to remote execution, (xii) feature release challenges, (xiii) integrating new standards, (xiv) challenges with clients, (xv) knowledge sharing, (xvi) responsibility distribution issues are the challenges while using DevOps. The founded list of perceived challenges will help future research to suggest mitigation and risk management strategies for successful use of DevOps.

Quō vādis, Data Business? A Study for understanding maturity of embedded system companies in data economy

• Data has been claimed to be the new oil of the 21st century as it has seen to be able both to improve the existing products and services as well as to create new revenue streams for its utilizing company with a secondary customers base. However, while there is active streams of research for developing machine learning and data science methods, considerably less has been done to understand and characterize data business activities in the software-intensive companies. This study uses a multiple case study approach in the software-intensive embedded system domain. Four large international embedded system companies were selected as the case study subjects. The objective is to understand how the case companies are developing their activities for successful utilization of the data. The study identifies six distinct stages with their own challenges. In addition, this study serves as a starting for further work for supporting software-intensive embedded system companies to start data business.

Implementing AI ethics in a software engineering project-based learning environment - The case of WIMMA lab

• Increasing ethical concerns necessitate AI ethics forms part of practical software engineering (SE) foundational educational learn- ing. Using an ethnographic approach and focus group discussions in a SE project-based learning environment, WIMMA lab, we gain insight into how AI ethics can be implemented to enable students to acquire these necessary skills. We propose a framework as an outcome to aid the implementation of AI ethics skills within SE project-based learning environments.

Conducting B2B SaaS Business with a Freemium Model: A Case Study

• This article studies what are the characteristics of a B2B SaaS freemium firm. Freemium in a B2B setting is an under-explored phenomenon whereas B2C SaaS freemium has been studied extensively. On the consumer side freemium has played a big role but freemium has only recently started to enter the B2B environment. Traditional, sales-led B2B SaaS companies have increasingly begun to turn to freemium and hence, it is important to understand how do they go about it. The empirical qualitative research was conducted as a case study and the data was gathered by interviewing European B2B SaaS freemium businesses. The data was analysed using qualitative thematic analysis and the coding approach used for identifying the concepts was open coding and axial coding. From the data three main success factor themes emerged that were evident in the B2B environment: customer success, internal enablers and external enablers.

Increasing Employees’ Willingness to Share: Introducing Appeal Strategies for People Analytics

• Increasingly digital workplaces enable advanced people analytics (PA) that can improve work, but also implicate privacy risks for employees. These systems often depend on employees sharing their data voluntarily. Thus, to leverage the potential benefits of PA, companies have to manage employees’ disclosure decision. In literature, we identify two main strategies: increase awareness or apply appeal strategies. While increased awareness may lead to more conservative data handling, appeal strategies can promote data sharing. Yet, to our knowledge, no systematic overview of appeal strategies for PA exists. Thus, we develop an initial taxonomy of strategies based on a systematic literature review and interviews with 18 experts. We describe strategies in the dimensions of values, benefits, and incentives. Thereby, we present concrete options to increase the appeal of PA for employees.

Anti-Pattern Detection in Process-Driven Decision Support Systems

• Decision makers increasingly rely on decision support systems for optimal decision making. Recently, special attention has been paid to process-driven decision support systems (PD-DSS) in which a process model prescribes the invocation sequence of software-based decision support services and the data exchange between them. Thus, it is possible to quickly combine available decision support services as needed for optimally supporting the decision making process of an individual decision maker. However, process modelers may accidentally create a process model which is technically well-formed and executable, but contains functional and behavioral flaws such as redundant or missing services. These flaws may result in inefficient computations or invalid decision recommendations when the corresponding PD-DSS is utilized by a decision maker. In this paper, we therefore propose an approach to validate functionality and behavior of a process model representing a PD-DSS. Our approach is based on expressing flaws as anti-patterns for which the process model can be automatically checked via graph matching. We prototypically implemented our approach and demonstrate its applicability in the context of decision making for energy network planning.

An investigation of factors influencing online shopping behaviors in the context of China and Australia

• Online shopping has gained much popularity over the past decade. Indeed, in a post-COVID world, online shopping is the only medium of shopping for many. A great deal of research effort has been devoted to understanding the factors that positively or negatively influence online shopping behavior of consumers. However, most of these influence relationships have been studied individually, and not how such factors interrelate with each other and thus the underlying complex driving and dependence relationships among those factors are unknown. Moreover, these underlying driving and dependence relationships among online shopping behavior factors can be highly dependent on the cultural context of the consumers. In this research we identify the key factors that have been shown to have influence on online shopping behavior from a rigorous review of literature. We then apply an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) technique to find the underlying complex hierarchical relations of factors related to Australian and Chinese culture. We apply MICMAC analysis to find the driving and dependence power of these factors in context of these two cultures. We finally explain the differences and similarities found for Australian and Chinese culture with reference to Hofstede’s Cross Culture theory. Prominent findings include timeliness of delivery and order accuracy is considered having high dependence and driving power in the Australian context but has low driving and dependence power in Chinese context. Our findings will be beneficial for including better cultural context factors into future online shopping platform design.

Digital Transformation towards Sustainability: A Case Study of Process Views in District Heating

• Digital transformation (DT) has the potential to change our society toward the United Nation's sustainable development goals. However, developing software for the DT towards sustainability is a complex process that may entail an emphasis on optimization, eco-feedback, reflection, and participation. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how organizations navigate this complexity of different process views with a case study of a DT in district heating. Based on ten interviews with a software development company, eight interviews with a district heating supplier, and 14 interviews with consumers, we analyze the process views on their DT. This analysis shows how organizations navigate the different process views in a DT journey when encountering and solving problems. We conclude the paper by providing propositions on what navigating DT implies. Furthermore, we discuss how these insights can help practitioners navigate different process views and how our findings nuance the understanding of the DT process.

Gender Bias in the Recruitment Process of IT Startups in the Netherlands

• In today’s fast-changing and innovative world, startups must compete amongst themselves and other well-established companies to hire the best talent in order to succeed. Diversity within the recruitment process is typically not a priority, even though it is well known that a diverse team is beneficial for (business) outcomes. Through a multiple case study performed at 5 IT startups based in the Netherlands, we observed that gender bias is introduced from the first moment that the need for an employee has been identified until candidate hiring. This is a direct result from (1) a lack of resources (e.g., time and money), (2) urgency to find the first and best candidate, or (3) the awareness of the startup founders.

Green ICT Adoption and Challenges: Evidence from the Finnish ICT Sector

• For better or worse, information, communication, and technology (ICT) is taking over most part of our lives. During the past few years, organizations, industries, and educational and health institutions that could utilize the power of ICT and digitalization maintained high productivity, efficiency, economic and social resilience. Yet, at the same time, the trend towards digital transformation is contributing its fair share to increased energy consumption, e-waste, and carbon emissions. The challenge is how to ensure that organizations successfully embark on their digital strategy with sustainability at the center of the digital transformation. In this study, we aim to understand the motivations and needs of organizations towards adopting green ICT as a response to the sustainable development agenda. Through an exploratory and qualitative study, we surveyed ICT-related organizations to understand their motivations and challenges to adopting green ICT. Our findings show a lack of green ICT awareness and a vague corporate strategy for green ICT adoption. This study provides a foundation for practitioners and policymakers to develop strategies and support systems to enhance the organizational green ICT transformation agenda.