Driven by the ongoing emergence of digitaltechnologies, today's business environment is changing at tremendous speed. Thus, incumbents have initiated #digitaltransformation programs to cope with the associated challenges. While transformation programs are typically associated with punctuated change, emerging research conceptualizes digital transformation as an ongoing process that demands new approaches to organizational change. Hitherto, we lack insights on how organizations prepare themselves for such continuouschange.

Thus, we conducted an explorative interview study with 29 interview partners that provide insights from different roles, organizations, and industries. Thereby, we gained an overview of organizations' digital transformation realities and challenges. We contribute to the existing literature on digital transformation by elucidating the individual foci and interdependencies of digital, agile, and cultural transformation. Further, we shed light on additional elements that foster continuous change, i.e., organizational culture, purpose, vision, and values in the context of digital transformation.

Please read more about our research in our paper “Everything Is IT, but IT Is Not Everything – How Organizations Manage Their Digital Transformation Towards Continuous Change” which has been accepted for presentation at the 42nd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2021) that takes place from December 12 to 15 in Austin, Texas.

Companies across industries aim to disseminate blockchain through respective projects that evaluate, design, or implement use cases. However, due to its novelty and complexity, blockchain poses novel challenges in carrying out such projects. Companies use success criteria to constantly evaluate projects. Even though literature provides frameworks for the general evaluation of projects, no research yet investigated if success criteria fundamentally differ for blockchain projects due to the characteristics of the technology.

Therefore, we assessed success dimensions and criteria, deduced and evaluated from an in-depth interview study with blockchain experts from 12 different projects. We contribute to the theory on blockchain project management by introducing a new success dimension and specific success criteria for blockchain projects. Our findings help to elaborate the value of blockchain in companies and novel possibilities to evaluate respective projects. We provide additional insights by assessing their relative importance and discussing implications for theory and practice.

Please read more about our research in our paper “You Can't Manage What You Can't Define: The Success of Blockchain Projects Beyond the Iron Triangle” which has been accepted for presentation at the 42nd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2021) that takes place from December 12 to 15 in Austin, Texas.

IS research emphasizes that blockchain requires trust in the technology itself. However, we lack knowledge on the applicability of established trust cues to blockchain technology. Thus, our research objective was to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of several established IS trust formation factors on end user trust. We did so by conducting a between-groups experiment.

While we could validate the applicability of previous IS trust research for blockchain technology to some extent, we found that trust signals emphasizing the technology’s underlying trust-building characteristics are most effective. Hence, we highlight the need for contextualization of trust research on blockchain technology. We provide both researchers and practitioners with insights for building trustworthy blockchain applications that enable trust-less interactions not only in theory but in practice.

Please read more about our research in our latest #IJIM paper (50 days' free access).

Three papers from my research group at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, University of Bayreuth, Research Center Finance & Information Management and Fraunhofer FIT have been accepted for presentation at the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-55) which will take place January 4-7, 2022:

• Brennecke, M., Guggenberger, T., Schellinger, B. and Urbach, N. (2022) The De-Central Bank in Decentralized Finance: A Case Study of MakerDAO, Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-55), January 4-7, Maui, Hawaii. (Link)
  
• Hinsen, S., Hofmann, P., Jöhnk, J. and Urbach, N. (2022) How Can Organizations Design Purposeful Human-AI Interactions: A Practical Perspective From Existing Use Cases and Interviews, Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-55), January 4-7, Maui, Hawaii. (Link)
• Schellinger, B., Völter, F., Urbach, N. and Sedlmeir, J. (2022) Yes, I Do: Marrying Blockchain Applications with GDPR, Proceedings of the 55th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-55), January 4-7, Maui, Hawaii. (Link)
  

Our whitepaper "Self-Sovereign Identity - Basics, Applications and Potentials of Portable Digital Identities" is now also available in English. We present the most important conceptual and technological foundations of SSI based on four case studies.

Please feel free to forward our whitepaper to people for whom it might also be of interest. You can download the paper as PDF here.

In case you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out. We hope you enjoy reading the whitepaper!

When crafting a digital strategy, how do you make sure that all relevant internal experts end up pulling in the same direction?

The answer is in the way you prepare for the strategizing process. In a study that has just been accepted for publication, Benjamin Müller and I are able to reveal the critical steps that teams of functional experts had to go through to build a solid foundation for digital strategizing. Through a series of case studies, we not only provide detailed insights into procedures that positively impact an organization’s ability to strategize digitally, but also show how these procedures help pull the teams together – an important catalyst for successfully implementing digital strategies.

Read our full study as an open access publication here.

The business relevance of artificial intelligence (AI) is underpinned by success stories from various industries. However, the successful use of AI is by no means a foregone conclusion. The ability of a company to innovatively design AI-based services and integrate them into its organizational value creation determines its competitiveness. Based on the competencies and practical experience of the Project Group Business Informatics of Fraunhofer FIT, the Technology Transfer Center Data Analytics of Augsburg University of Applied Sciences and the University of Bayreuth, we present the AI Service Canvas in this study and provide a brief insight into AI practice.

The AI Service Canvas allows companies to describe, evaluate, and design AI-based services from both an innovation and technology perspective. Thus, we offer a tool that can be used along the entire innovation process. With the consistent use of the AI Service Canvas, companies can avoid flying blind in the development of AI-based services. By taking a holistic view, questions from the infrastructure level to the process/system level to the business level are answered. Furthermore, we provide an insight into the practical application of AI by adding field reports from our research and practical projects.

You can download our (German) white paper on the AI Service Canvas here.

In our whitepaper “Self-Sovereign Identity – Foundations, Applications and Potentials of portable digital identities” (so far only available in German), we outline the most important conceptual and technological foundations of self-sovereign identities before presenting some use cases in detail. Subsequently, we take a closer look at the economic potential as well as the challenges of self-sovereign identities.