Design Science Research Project Research Articles

Assessing digital capabilities for digital transformation—The MIND framework

AbstractWith the rise in the advances and adoption of digital technologies and evolving business dynamics, we live in an era where many organisations are embarking on digital transformation. To stay relevant, however, organisations struggle to comprehensively outline the digital capabilities they have or need in relation to the digital transformation objectives they aim for. This struggle stems from the paucity of knowledge and practical guidance on how to assess the digital capabilities of organisations relative to their desired digital transformation goals. This paper presents a framework (MIND Framework) for assessing digital capabilities in four critical areas – Management (M), Infrastructure (I), Networking/Sourcing (N), and Development (D) – abstracted from prior literature. The framework assesses digital capability status in each area in relation to the organisation's stated digital transformation goals. MIND, which is an outcome of a multi‐year design science research project, helps organisations assess their current capability status and create a pathway for navigating from their current status to the desired transformation state. In this article, we describe an in‐depth application of the MIND framework in assessing the digital capabilities of an incumbent company in the digital transformation process. Based on this, we illustrate how the framework can provide valuable insights and attitudinal shifts in an organisation's digital transformation efforts. We further abstract from the case to demonstrate how the assessment of an organisation's digital capabilities can provide valuable insights and critical input for any organisation embarking on a digital transformation journey. We conclude with a detailed guideline on how organisations can apply the MIND framework in their transformation journey.

Designing trust-enabling blockchain systems for the inter-organizational exchange of capacity

In times of rapid and unpredictable developments, companies experience significant volatility in capacity utilization. Virtual capacity exchange platforms help to mitigate this challenge by exchanging capacities with anonymous participants in market-like peer-to-peer networks. However, its efficiency is hindered by behavioral uncertainties, including a lack of inter-organizational trust in other participants. To leverage the potential of such exchange platforms, this paper reports on a Design Science Research project aiming to derive and validate design principles for establishing trust in inter-organizational capacity exchange in two design iterations. Using blockchain technology, we instantiate six design principles into an artifact and perform experimental evaluations to investigate their effect on perceived trust. Our paper contributes to research and practice by identifying and applying prescriptive design knowledge and advancing our understanding of how to design trust-enabling inter-organizational systems. The originality lies within the empirical investigation of how and why different design principle combinations can be established through blockchain technology as one of the promising approaches for establishing trust. In doing this, we also disclose future pathways for IS and blockchain researchers and practitioners.

An Educational Business Model Ideation Tool – Insights from a Design Science Project

Nowadays, it is crucial to teach business model ideation skills in education beyond disciplinary boundaries to shape students’ abilities to innovate processes, products, and entire businesses. Emerging (software-based) tooling for new ideas and innovations, however, often neglects the unique characteristics faced for educational purposes. Against this backdrop, we designed a novel artifact for teaching business model ideation in digital learning environments. By drawing on knowledge from pattern-based innovation, creativity, and conversational Artificial Intelligence, we built a personal ideation companion entitled PICO. Our companion navigates students through five common ideation phases, encouraging them to innovate business models in a divergent-convergent thinking style. The web-based tool covers diverse features on an educational, social, and motivational layer to teach business model basics and to promote creativity and versatile thinking along the ideation process. Based on our design science research project, we report on situational instantiation and provide abstract guidelines for its design and implementation in (entrepreneurship) education. The artifact has been evaluated in several formal and informal learning scenarios including altogether over 70 students from Information Systems and Entrepreneurship programs as well as 10 employees from company-driven training programs on innovation.

From Academic Design Science Research to Start-up: Building a Digital Platform Ecosystem to Promote a Sustainable Knowledge Co-Creating Community

As the new digital era is accompanied by accelerating change, people as well as institutions need to adapt and transform. Crucial for their success is how well leaders can cultivate the absorption and sharing of knowledge as a resource and its integration into the organisational endeavours. Innovative system designs may prove vital to providing crucial support.
 Based on a prior academic design science research project and published outputs, a recently established start-up aims to create a digital community platform for knowledge co-creation to serve members with diverse ambitions and potentials in their personal and collaborative contexts. The digital platform ecosystem follows a novel knowledge management approach by favouring personalization, mobility, generativity, and entropy reduction. How to sustainably address the inherent system complexities and scaling needs in an entrepreneurial environment known for short iterative cycles of minimum viable developments have proven to be an expected challenge, closely followed by the limited power of academic detail and lingo to create enthusiasm in start-up spaces where attention slots are measured in pitch decks and elevator rides.
 This paper looks at this particular case and at the lessons learnt in the transition phase from academia to a business incubation space and, hence, aims to contribute to the discourse between scholars, practitioners, and clients on how digital entrepreneurship and innovation spaces may be best served for mutual benefit.

Human-Centric AI to Mitigate AI Biases

The global health crisis represents an unprecedented opportunity for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. This article aims to tackle part of the biases in artificial intelligence by implementing a human-centric AI to help decision-makers in organizations. It relies on the results of two design science research (DSR) projects: SCHOPPER and VRAILEXIA. These two design projects operationalize the human-centric AI approach with two complementary stages: 1) the first installs a human-in-loop informed design process, and 2) the second implements a usage architecture that aggregates AI and humans. The proposed framework offers many advantages such as permitting to integrate of human knowledge into the design and training of the AI, providing humans with an understandable explanation of their predictions, and driving the advent of augmented intelligence that can turn algorithms into a powerful counterweight to human decision-making errors and humans as a counterweight to AI biases.

Design science for small scale studies: Recommendations for undergraduates and junior researchers

Design science is a research methodology that can be applied for both small scale studies at undergraduate level and for large scale application in the industry. Design science is a research methodology with several branches, with slightly different processes built around a common foundation. This paper has a focus on the branch developed by Johannesson and Perjons, and the five-phase model that is included in this branch: 1) explicate problem, 2) define requirements, 3) design and develop artefact, 4) demonstrate artefact, and 5) evaluate artefact. All these five phases must of course be carried out in a complete large-scale project in many real-world developments. However, the problem with applying a design science research project for undergraduates is that a thorough implementation of all the five phases is often too demanding for a Bachelor’s or a Master's thesis. A reason for this is that several of the phases are better carried out in an iterative manner to obtain a quality result, which is time-consuming. The aim of this paper is to discuss the challenges and opportunities in applying design science for small scale studies, such as those conducted by undergraduates in their theses or by researchers new to the field. Based on this discussion, the paper concludes with a set of recommendations for how the design science methodology can be modified and applied to accommodate these smaller studies. The main recommendation is, as the principle for quality research, to delimit and to choose a specific focus that is carried out in depth. Some examples of focuses, that also are recommended by Johannesson and Perjons, are requirements and development focused design science research or evaluation focused design science research. An interesting follow-up to this position paper would be to study the application of design science in Bachelor’s theses and where the emphasis is placed? Moreover, it would be interesting to investigate how design science is applied by researchers and compare if their emphasis in the design science methodology differs from that of undergraduates.

Enhancing conversational agents for successful operation: A multi-perspective evaluation approach for continuous improvement

Contemporary organizations increasingly adopt conversational agents (CAs) as intelligent and natural language-based solutions for providing services and information. CAs offer new forms of personalization, speed, (cost-)effectiveness, and automation. However, despite their hype in research and practice, many organizations still fail to seize CAs’ potential because they lack knowledge of how to evaluate and improve the quality of CAs to sustain them in organizational operations. We aim to fill this knowledge gap by conducting a design science research project in which we aggregate insights from the literature and practice to derive an applicable set of quality criteria for CAs. Our article contributes to CA research and guides practitioners by providing a blueprint to structure the evaluation of CAs and to discover areas for systematic improvement.

Knowledge contributions in design science research: Paths of knowledge types

Design science research addresses important, complex real-world problems. Although well-accepted as part of research in information systems, initiating or progressing a design science research project still requires effort to describe how knowledge creation emerges and its underlying dynamics. Given the existing body of knowledge on design science research, it should be possible to learn from that knowledge to progress future work. This paper analyzes design science research projects to identify and make explicit their knowledge contributions while recognizing the plurality of a project's knowledge contributions with respect to a project's knowledge scope and knowledge goals. The construct of a path of knowledge types is introduced that represents how knowledge contributions are dynamically created throughout a project. These paths form the basis for the derivation of seven design science research strategies, which lead to guidelines for initiating or progressing a project. This effort is compared to other research that analyzes the growing body of work in design science with respect to knowledge contributions and project classifications.

Designing a shared freight service intelligence platform for transport stakeholders using mobile telematics

Internet of Things (IoT) technology transforms freight transport operations by adopting novel data-driven services and enables information sharing among actors involved in global transport chains. Mobile telematics represents emerging IoT technologies for global forwarding increasingly applied to full loads conveyed by freight transport assets (FTAs) (e.g., ISO containers) facilitating intelligent services. In this light, telematics-enabled FTAs support freight transport operations utilized by individual stakeholders in three overarching service dimensions: transport management, fleet management, and risk management. This topic is, however, understudied by information systems (IS) research and service science. For this reason, we establish a design science research project, conceptualize a shared Freight Service Intelligence Platform (FSIP), and introduce freight service intelligence as an interdisciplinary research field. To this aim, we first review related literature, interview 14 transport stakeholders, and theorize six meta-requirements. Second, we propose five design principles that indicate how the meta-requirements may be associated. Third, we develop a web-based prototype application to instantiate the proposed design principles comprising performance analytics, anomaly detection, risk assessment including prediction, data exchange, communication, and IS integration. Subsequently, we evaluate the application with six transport stakeholders and logistics software vendors. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on the implications of an emerging topic addressed by this paper.

Designing a Crowd-Based Relocation System—The Case of Car-Sharing

Car-sharing services promise environmentally sustainable and cost-efficient alternatives to private car ownership, contributing to more environmentally sustainable mobility. However, the challenge of balancing vehicle supply and demand needs to be addressed for further improvement of the service. Currently, employees must relocate vehicles from low-demand to high-demand areas, which generates extra personnel costs, driven kilometers, and emissions. This study takes a Design Science Research (DSR) approach to develop a new way of balancing the supply and demand of vehicles in car-sharing, namely crowd-based relocation. We base our approach on crowdsourcing, a concept by which customers are requested to perform vehicle relocations. This paper reports on our comprehensive DSR project on designing and instantiating a crowd-based relocation information system (CRIS). We assessed the resulting artifact in a car-sharing simulation and conducted a real-world car-sharing service system field test. The evaluation reveals that CRIS has the potential for improving vehicle availability, increasing environmental sustainability, and reducing operational costs. Further, the prescriptive knowledge derived in our DSR project can be used as a starting point to improve individual parts of the CRIS and to extend its application beyond car-sharing into other sharing services, such as power bank- or e-scooter-sharing.

Design and Evaluation of a Conversational Agent for Facilitating Idea Generation in Organizational Innovation Processes

Large numbers of incomplete, unclear, and unspecific submissions on idea platforms hinder organizations to exploit the full potential of open innovation initiatives as idea selection is cumbersome. In a design science research project, we develop a design for a conversational agent (CA) based on artificial intelligence to facilitate contributors in generating elaborate ideas on idea platforms where human facilitation is not scalable. We derive prescriptive design knowledge in the form of design principles, instantiate, and evaluate the CA in two successive evaluation episodes. The design principles contribute to the current research stream on automated facilitation and can guide providers of idea platforms to enhance idea generation and subsequent idea selection processes. Results indicate that CA-based facilitation is engaging for contributors and yields well-structured and elaborated ideas.

Designing Personality-Adaptive Conversational Agents for Mental Health Care

Millions of people experience mental health issues each year, increasing the necessity for health-related services. One emerging technology with the potential to help address the resulting shortage in health care providers and other barriers to treatment access are conversational agents (CAs). CAs are software-based systems designed to interact with humans through natural language. However, CAs do not live up to their full potential yet because they are unable to capture dynamic human behavior to an adequate extent to provide responses tailored to users’ personalities. To address this problem, we conducted a design science research (DSR) project to design personality-adaptive conversational agents (PACAs). Following an iterative and multi-step approach, we derive and formulate six design principles for PACAs for the domain of mental health care. The results of our evaluation with psychologists and psychiatrists suggest that PACAs can be a promising source of mental health support. With our design principles, we contribute to the body of design knowledge for CAs and provide guidance for practitioners who intend to design PACAs. Instantiating the principles may improve interaction with users who seek support for mental health issues.

Designing Attentive Information Dashboards

Information dashboards are a critical capability in contemporary business intelligence and analytics systems. Despite their strong potential to support better decision-making, the massive amount of information they provide challenges users performing data exploration tasks. Accordingly, dashboard users face difficulties in managing their limited attentional resources when processing the presented information on dashboards. Also, studies have shown that the amount of concentrated time humans can spend on a task has dramatically decreased in recent years; thus, there is a need for designing user interfaces that support users attention management. In this design science research project, we propose attentive information dashboards that provide individualized visual attention feedback (VAF) as an innovative artifact to solve this problem. We articulate theoretically grounded design principles and instantiate a software artifact leveraging users eye movement data in real time to provide individualized VAF. We evaluated the instantiated artifact in a controlled lab experiment with 92 participants. The results from analyzing users eye movement after receiving individualized VAF reveal that our proposed design has a positive effect on users attentional resource allocation, attention shift rate, and attentional resource management. We contribute a system architecture for attentive information dashboards that support data exploration and two theoretically grounded design principles that provide prescriptive knowledge on how to provide individualized VAF. Practitioners can leverage the prescriptive knowledge derived from our research to design innovative systems that support users information processing by managing their limited attentional resources.

Domain Model Based Design of Business Process Architectures

A business process architecture (BPA) model depicts business processes in an organization and their relations. An artifact for generating BPA models is proposed as the outcome of a design science research project. The proposed artifact consists of a method (i.e., a set of concepts, a proposed notation, and a detailed procedure), which is termed the domain-based BPA (dBPA) method due to using domain models as a starting point. The dBPA method tackles issues of currently available approaches: lack of structured inputs, limited consideration of process relations types, and restricted use of industry-standard modeling languages. The paper formalizes the dBPA method and illustrates its application in the manufacturing industry. Evaluation of the dBPA method revealed that practitioners perceived it as useful to achieve its goal with the benefits of being objective and clear and allowing to create complete and understandable BPA models that enable the integration of processes and the software that automates them.

A Practical View of Gamifying Information Systems for the Future

Gamification's role to support usability and innovation in the manufacturing industry is in its infancy. The present study displays a multi-cited ethnographical approach of a design science research project conducted between a start-up gamification firm and a manufacturing company. The case shows how different gamification design methods are used when gamifying a novel human modelling system. Furthermore, the interference from method to the design is presented and compared with conceptual views of gamification design. The findings show the need for early technical due diligence in collaborations between newer and older firms as well as the need for more comprehensive gamification frameworks to support industry design of gamification in different contexts.

Building resilience and innovation through intelligent diverse supplier engagement

This paper reports the main findings from a design science research project that sets out to explore and understand the need for a more scientific and democratised process for preselecting, vetting, and engaging start-up and SME suppliers in a manufacturing environment. The project, using aerospace manufacturing as a test case will investigate the feasibility of using artificially intelligent web-scraping, third-party APIs, and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to provide a localised and highly automated manufacturing marketplace. This paper's findings lend insight into emerging digital platform engagements between participating supply chain actors in open innovation environments.

How Designers Use Design Principles: Design Behaviors and Application Modes

This paper investigates how information systems design professionals use design principles (extracted from a prior design science research project) in a new design situation. We do this by capturing think-aloud protocols from experienced design professionals who are given access to potentially useful design principles. Our analysis identifies two dimensions of use: design behaviors (what designers do) and application modes (how designers apply the principles). Mapping across the dimensions suggests two use pathways: forward chaining and backward chaining. Our study shows how empirically studying expert designers can shed light on the microprocesses of design principles in use, and how an empirical turn in the investigation can contribute to clarifying the fundamental nature of design principles. We conclude by highlighting the implications of these insights for crafting more useful design principles.

Projectability and Heritage Management of Design Knowledge: A Grass-Roots Artefact Perspective of a Longitudinal Research Project for Knowledge Management System Innovation

This article expands on design science-research (DSR) publications which—based on current knowledge management systems (KM/KMS) and practices—are conceptualizing and prototyping a novel more generative and knowledge-worker-centric approach just presented as a desirable sustainable KMS vision. The perspective taken follows up on recent systematic literature reviews and content analysis studies reporting on the poor knowledge accumulation and evolution in the design, information science, and KM disciplines. Proposed remedies and initiatives are pitched against the novel KMS development case with its longitudinal stream of research output. As the design and creation of complex innovative artefacts facing ‘wicked’ challenges are seldom complemented by concurrent research papers, rare insights are offered of how similar longitudinal DSR or KMS projects may be structured and of how the related domain’s heritage knowledge base and its fitness-for-use-and-evolution may be strengthened. Due to the cycles and progression of its prior publications, this case study is particularly suited to contribute to cumulative research synthesis and, hence, further focusses on the recently proposed notions of projecting and projectability for evaluating distances between actual real-world environments and future possible-world application-ecosystems—a perspective which may become essential acceptance criteria for publishing in DSR-related conferences and journal publishing outlets.

UR: SMART\u2013A tool for analyzing social media content

The digital transformation, with its ongoing trend towards electronic business, confronts companies with increasingly growing amounts of data which have to be processed, stored and analyzed. Instant access to the “right” information at the time it is needed is crucial and thus, the use of techniques for the handling of big amounts of unstructured data, in particular, becomes a competitive advantage. In this context, one important field of application is digital marketing, because sophisticated data analysis allows companies to gain deeper insights into customer needs and behavior based on their reviews, complaints as well as posts in online forums or social networks. However, existing tools for the automated analysis of social content often focus on one general approach by either prioritizing the analysis of the posts’ semantics or the analysis of pure numbers (e.g., sum of likes or shares). Hence, this design science research project develops the software tool UR:SMART, which supports the analysis of social media data by combining different kinds of analysis methods. This allows deep insights into users’ needs and opinions and therefore prepares the ground for the further interpretation of the voice. The applicability of UR:SMART is demonstrated at a German financial institution. Furthermore, the usability is evaluated with the help of a SUMI (Software Usability Measurement Inventory) study, which shows the tool’s usefulness to support social media analyses from the users’ perspective.

CLARK: A Design Science Research Project for Building and Sharing High-Quality Cybersecurity Curricula

The Cybersecurity Labs and Resource Knowledge-base cybersecurity curriculum resource library is a large-scale design science research project developed to address critical demands in teaching cybersecurity and help faculty prepare cybersecurity graduates for the workforce. This article includes a description of the CLARK curriculum model, system, and collections, our experiences in its evolution, and the lessons learned that might benefit similar DSR projects to rapidly disseminate high-value curricular resources to the education community.