Aleksandre Asatiani

University of Gothenburg | GU · Department of Applied Information Technology

While remote work allows organisations to offer their employees flexibility and harness global talent and markets for business growth, inability to rely on physical interactions between employees imposes challenges specific to operations in highly virtual work environments. Among these characteristic issues are challenges associated with organisati...

The paper presents an approach for implementing inscrutable (i.e., nonexplainable) artificial intelligence (AI) such as neural networks in an accountable and safe manner in organizational settings. Drawing on an exploratory case study and the recently proposed concept of envelopment, it describes a case of an organization successfully "enveloping"...

Competition in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is increasingly moving from being motivated by cost savings towards strategic benefits that service providers can offer to their clients. Innovation is one such benefit that is expected nowadays in outsourcing engagements. The rising importan...

Organisations' increasing adoption of lightweight automation, such as robotic process automation (RPA), raises concerns about the associated systems' robustness and security, with data-security concerns becoming further accentuated when tools of this sort are deployed for handling of potentially sensitive data. However, literature on designing thes...

This review discusses the challenges associated with the sustainability of remote workplaces, which have become more prevalent due to the growing trend of work digitalization and the pandemic-induced push to remote work. These challenges are highlighted in literature across various disciplines, including information systems, but these discourses ha...

Public sector organizations suffer from high levels of technical debt (TD). TD leaves digital infrastructures in a derelict state, making digital transformations costly and risky. Though there is growing research about TD, most studies focus on private businesses. In this study, we conduct a case study examining the TD in a Swedish municipality, an...

The rapid transition to remote work necessitated by the mobility restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19 introduced challenges to the onboarding of new hires for many organizations. Organizations with no prior experience of remote work, had to resort to emergent digital onboarding processes, addressing the problems as they surfaced. This experi...

Green bond markets promise to fight climate change by encouraging green investments. Yet, the real-world complexity of quantifying the green impact of sustainable initiatives might be exploited for greenwashing, thus threatening the entire market's credibility. Advances in business analytics research and practice hold the potential to untangle this...

Green Cargo is a state-owned railway logistics company based in Sweden. The company has a wealth of experience in train logistics, and it is well-positioned to benefit from the push toward the zero-carbon future. To materialize this potential and to support growth, Green Cargo needs to create a strong digital foundation. This teaching case presents...

Competition in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is increasingly moving from being motivated by cost savings towards strategic benefits that service providers can offer to their clients. Innovation is one such benefit that is expected nowadays in outsourcing engagements. The rising importan...

Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as a technology promising various quick wins: fast deployment, immediate efficiency gains, and low investment requirements. These promises have resulted in large-scale deployment of RPA in diverse industries. However, the choice of operation model remains tricky. The paper identifies three key decisions...

The paper applies a flow-oriented perspective to examine how temporal conditioning of the flows of people and digital technologies dynamically shape socio-technical formation and the transformation process of an AI (artificial intelligence) system. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a financial accounting services company that was developing and...

Robotic process automation (RPA) has transformed from a promising technology to an integral part of the business process automation toolkit. While there is a wealth of experience with RPA in the private sector organizations, public sector counterparts started to deploy the technology on scale only recently. Being a latecomer gives the public sector...

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on our lives and living. In higher education, it led to a swift shift from on-campus to online education resulting in practices of emergency remote teaching through virtual classrooms. In this project, we seek to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that this abrupt, enforced ch...

Huge increases in computing capacity and data volumes have spurred the development of applications that use artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that is being implemented for increasingly complex tasks, from playing Go to screening for cancer. Private and public businesses and organizations are deploying AI applications to process vast quanti...

In this paper, we investigate the initial reactions and perceptions of knowledge workers to a planned implementation of robotic process automation (RPA). Using purposive sampling, we conduct a case study in an industry in which workers’ jobs are notoriously vulnerable to automation: we study an accounting firm that is planning to introduce RPA into...

This study is motivated by the apparent shortage of research on information systems (IS) outsourcing engagements that are leveraged for innovation on the client firm's behalf. Building on existing insights related to this managerial problem, we explore factors located within and outside the boundaries of an outsourcing engagement that shape the dyn...

The difficulty of extracting innovation from information technology (IT) outsourcing engagements poses an important managerial problem as client firms, more often than not, fail to harness the innovative capacity of their IT service providers. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of how such engagements can be managed more effect...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Forum which was held as part of the 18th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Seville, Spain, in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference took place virtually. The...

Knowledge work organizations are increasingly leveraging automation to enhance and transform their business processes. Many types of automation tools are being deployed in a large variety of information processing tasks, requiring effective management of human-automation cooperation. Yet, conceptual understanding of human-automation hybrid work rem...

Prior literature informs us that a company's decision to outsource a business process depends on process characteristics such as how frequently the process is performed or how specific the assets required by the process are. In this article, we compare the effects of accounting process characteristics on outsourcing decisions across users of tradit...

Innovation is increasingly expected in today's ongoing outsourcing relationships. While prior studies made considerable strides to examine innovation through outsourcing, the research landscape remains highly fragmented. In this review, we bring together and analyse prior research examining this emerging phenomenon in the contexts of IT outsourcing...

Prior literature has identified several outsourcing motivations, such as cost reduction and access to expertise, and deciphered the influence of these variables on outsourcing decisions. In another stream of outsourcing studies, researchers have gauged the degree of outsourcing, unearthing how companies may choose to outsource a set or processes in...

Outsourcing service providers are progressively being seen not just as efficient partners to handle peripheral tasks, but also as potential sources of impactful innovations. However, as clients reset the bar from cost efficiencies to mutual strategic value creation, the outcomes far too often fail to live up to such ambitious goals. This increasing...

In this paper, we study how continuities are constructed in virtual work environments by comparing two firms with differing degrees of virtuality. Using Organizational Discontinuity Theory and drawing on a qualitative study of two accounting firms operating in Finland, we observe virtual work discontinuities in the two firms and identify constructe...

Recent literature has identified two main types of IT-enabled innovation and labelled them as lightweight IT and heavyweight IT. In this study, we look into robotic process automation (RPA) as lightweight IT and traditional back-end system automation as heavyweight IT and study how a case company Telco makes the choice between these two alternative...

Cloud computing is a model for providing on-demand access to a shared pool of computational resources in a cost-efficient and convenient manner, involving minimal interaction with the cloud provider. Within the last eight years cloud computing has evolved from a promising, emerging technology to a credible alternative for fulfilling organizations’...

In addition to large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly engage in business process outsourcing (BPO) of professional services as they delegate routine processes such as accounting, recruitment and law to outsourcing service providers. In this study, we explore the outsourcing profiles of SMEs and use those profiles...

OpusCapita Group is a Finnish company offering financial processes and outsourcing services to medium-sized companies and large corporations. OpusCapita particularly focuses on comprehensive Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash processes. In hopes to stay ahead of the curve in financial process automation, OpusCapita is betting on Robotic Process Auto...

Cloud computing remains an increasingly popular topic among practitioners as well as researchers. The literature spans across multiple disciplines, and the knowledge is fragmented and not systematized. To address this issue we apply topic models to conduct a meta-review on cloud computing. We identify twenty research topics across multiple discipli...

Adoption of cloud computing in organizations is increasing at a rapid pace. It is expected that the majority of the organizations in industrialized nations will be using cloud services to some extent in the near future. In this review I categorize adoption factors utilized in the literature and identify determinants playing a key role in organizati...

The accounting industry is being disrupted by the introduction of cloud-based accounting information systems (AIS) that allow for a more efficient allocation of work between the accountant and the client company. In cloud-based AIS, the accountant and the client company as well as third parties such as auditors can simultaneously work on the data i...

In our everyday life, we are surrounded by events and phenomena that are difficult to explain or comprehend. Despite significant advances in many scientific fields and abundant availability of data on many aspects of our life, it is still a challenge to communicate slow and complex global processes to the average citizen. In this chapter, we study...

This teaching case considers Kluuvin Apteekki, a small pharmacy business whose CEO faces critical decisions whether or not (1) to outsource its accounting processes and (2) to start using cloud-based accounting information systems. The main learning outcome of the case is related to the development of the skills and competencies in creating a stron...

In this paper, we examine outsourcing of disaggregated information-intensive services. Drawing on the theoretical streams of Global Information-Intensive Service Disaggregation and Transaction-Cost Economics, we formulate our research model to understand the phenomenon of disaggregation in the context of cloud computing. The model encompasses frequ...