Andreas Hein

University of St. Gallen · School of Management

As overtourism and local overcrowding are becoming increasingly critical concerns, determining and predicting occupancy levels based on real-time data and predictive models that serve as a decision-making basis for necessary countermeasures are gaining popularity. Moreover, with the rise of large language models (LLMs), approaches that automate rel...

Firms seeking to implement generative artificial solutions (GenAI) encounter several tensions, such as sharing data to improve GenAI model performance while retaining control over data. These tensions are paradoxical, as they are persistent and require continuous management rather than resolution. This study investigates these paradoxical tensions...

Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms face distinct orchestration challenges in industry‐specific settings, such as the need for specialised resources, data‐sharing concerns, heterogeneous users and context‐sensitive applications. This study investigates how these platforms can effectively orchestrate autonomous actors in developing and consuming...

Low-code development platforms empower citizen developers to develop software quickly and with minimal technical expertise. However, entrusting software development to novices risks substandard software quality, shadow IT and technical debt. Drawing from 30 interviews with citizen developers and low-code platform experts, we offer guidance for gove...

This research investigates the interplay of top-down control and bottom-up self-organization within Digital Platform Ecosystems (DPEs), focusing on the formation and management of complementor coalitions. Although these coalitions can increase a DPE’s generativity, they can also threaten its integrity. We investigate this tension by employing Infor...

Zusammenfassung Der anhaltende Mangel an Fachkräften in der IT-Branche stellt eine zentrale Herausforderung für Unternehmen dar und erschwert den Fortschritt bei der digitalen Transformation. Infolgedessen gewinnt der Einsatz von Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) sowohl in der Praxis als auch in der Wissenschaft zunehmend an Interesse, um auch Mitarbeiter au...

The digital transformation of the public sector towards e-government brings benefits such as greater efficiency and transparency but also faces challenges, including a lag in digital innovation and a low adoption rate compared to the private sector. This gap, exacerbated by limited IT skills and outdated processes in the public sector, undermines p...

There is an increasing demand for a qualified future workforce in the enterprise software (ES) domain, for which students should be prepared. However, due to the complexity of ES, many lecturers lack the skills to practically integrate ES into their teaching activities. ES training must be investigated holistically to address this issue, integratin...

After the temporary shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rapid recovery and resumed growth of the tourism sectors accelerates unsustainable tourism, resulting in local (over-)crowding, environmental damage, increased emissions, and diminished tourism acceptance. Addressing these challenges requires an active visitor management system at points of in...

Objectives Healthcare providers employ heuristic and analytical decision-making to navigate the high-stakes environment of the emergency department (ED). Despite the increasing integration of information systems (ISs), research on their efficacy is conflicting. Drawing on related fields, we investigate how timing and mode of delivery influence IS e...

Personalized recommendations have played a vital role in tourism, serving various purposes, ranging from an improved visitor experience to addressing sustainability issues. However, research shows that recommendations are more likely to be accepted by visitors if they are comprehensible and appeal to the visitors’ common sense. This highlights the...

Tourism is an important economic driver for numerous regions, attracting more than one billion visitors annually. While economically significant, excessive numbers of visitors lead to local overcrowding, which negatively impacts visitors’ experience and safety, and causes environmental harm. This paper proposes a practical approach to empowering de...

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) significantly increase software development productivity by enabling users to develop and deploy applications with minimal coding required. However, despite LCDPs' productivity benefits and widespread adoption by individuals with no formal coding background ("citizen developers"), professional developers remai...

Technology integration in the financial sector holds immense potential to address critical global challenges. This paper presents a case study of the Egyptian fintech market and its role in advancing financial inclusion (FI). We reviewed literature on fintech in emerging markets and interviewed experts in the Egyptian fintech sector. To assess fint...

In an era where data is the new currency, organizations are contending to harness vast data influxes for data-driven innovation. Centralized data architectures, with extensive data warehouses and lakes, are buckling under the pressure of contextually complex and distributed demands, leading to data bottlenecks and alignment issues within organizati...

Incumbent firms feel pressured to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) in their business model (BM) to innovate and stay competitive. While transforming the BM with digital technologies is challenging, AI adds complexity through its countless applications and incomprehensible nature. Unraveling this complexity, we develop a taxonomy to describe...

Developing and operating AI systems based on machine learning (ML) has unique challenges that render traditional practices inappropriate (e.g., managing data drift). To that end, MLOps emerged as a novel paradigm for managers and teams to develop and operate such ML systems successfully. Organizations currently employ different maturity levels for...

This study proposes that actors' perceptions of digital transformation (DT), constructed through technological frames, can explain organizational tensions that firms experience during DT initiatives. We conducted a qualitative case study with a large manufacturer over 12 months, analyzing how different hierarchical employee groups' technological fr...

Personalized recommendations have played a vital role in tourism, serving various purposes, ranging from an improved visitor experience to addressing sustainability issues. However, research shows that recommendations are more likely to be accepted by visitors if they are comprehensible and appeal to the visitors' common sense. This highlights the...

Tourism is an important economic driver for numerous regions, attracting more than one billion visitors annually. While economically significant, excessive numbers of visitors lead to local overcrowding, which negatively impacts visitors' experience and safety, and causes environmental harm. This paper proposes a practical approach to empowering de...

This study examines the challenge of overcrowding within Emergency Department (ED) processes and elucidates the potential for AI-based interventions to enhance patient care and operational efficiency. We used qualitative interviews conducted in two German hospitals to identify five challenges along the ED care pathway: limited demand predictability...

Organizations are shifting from traditional business models towards a collaborative, data-centric paradigm, giving rise to data ecosystems. However, while opportunities for leveraging data in these ecosystems are vast, such ecosystems' structure, governance, and operation remain nebulous. Thus, our research delves into the operational intricacies o...

Traffic caused by drivers searching for a free parking space has numerous negative effects, such as increased emissions and noise pollution. Innovative solutions can reduce these negative effects by providing car drivers with better information via a smart parking app. However, smart parking apps currently do not offer overarching solutions which s...

Firms struggle with improving end-to-end (E2E) processes due to difficulties in establishing shared E2E process understanding across firm levels. Creating behavioral visibility into processes might provide a solution, but traditional methods are limited in effectiveness. Thus, process mining (PM), offering data-driven process discovery and measurem...

In the rapidly evolving digital transformation (DT) landscape, understanding organizational identity (OI) complexities becomes imperative. Leveraging a comparative analysis of AutoCorp and its spinoff, SoftCorp, this paper unfolds OI tensions in the context of DT. Despite advances in the literature on OI and DT, a gap exists in understanding how co...

Open government data (OGD) platform ecosystems hold immense potential for promoting transparency, civic engagement, economic growth, and improved governmental offerings. The prevailing strategy to building OGD platform ecosystems follows a sequential approach where the OGD platform is built first and the ecosystem is built second, resulting in low...

The predominant use of private cars is the root of several problems like traffic congestion and air pollution in cities worldwide. While it is generally believed that mobility apps as part of smart city initiatives can help influence mobility choices in favor of public transport, there is not much empirical evidence for this. This study used a choi...

Most manufacturing firms that undergo digital transformation fail to seize the expected benefits. A key reason is that those firms fail to extend their identity of operational excellence with a digital service provider identity, leading to tensions at the interface-the product. Although research has addressed individual aspects of organizational id...

The increasing importance of digital platforms on creating and consuming value is undisputed. Digital platforms integrate and orchestrate an ecosystem of autonomous actors to co-create value instead of relying solely on internal innovation capabilities. The platform owner provides digital affordances through boundary resources that an ecosystem of...

The success of mergers & acquisitions (M&A) depends on the buyer's adequate due diligence (DD) assessment of the target firm. Assessing the target's IT-enabled processes recently emerged as a novel information technology DD (IT DD) responsibility. However, it remains unclear how to operationalize and conduct the process assessment in IT DD. To addr...

As a result of the rural exodus over the last decades, unused vacancies in rural areas are at risk of falling into disrepair. Given the current trends of flexible workplaces and people returning to rural areas, their repurposing as coworking spaces (CWSs) by entrepreneurs poses a potential for sustainable future-oriented workplace solutions. Howeve...

Low-code development platforms (LCDPs) offer organizations the potential to reassign time-intensive software development tasks from professional to citizen developers, freeing up resources for professionals while empowering domain experts. However, while software can be rapidly built through citizen development (CDD), organizations must look beyond...

Digital platform ecosystems increasingly dominate the enterprise software domain, and the persistence of platforms depends on the sustained engagement of complementors. However, there is a limited understanding of its antecedents, complementors' evaluation of antecedents and the manifestations and dynamic changes of complementors' engagement. There...

The urgency of global climate change is becoming increasingly evident, but prevailing mobility patterns in developed countries still cause severe environmental damage. Therefore, developed countries need to change their mobility patterns fundamentally, such as modal changes to public transportation instead of private car use. Digital nudging in dig...

Platform governance can contribute to the overall success of an ecosystem; however, what factors influence governance decisions remains to be understood. We propose that platform owners define and implement platform governance following their unique structure of ownership as digital platforms may be owned by a single, or many independent intermedia...

The urgency of climate change is evident worldwide, but current mobility patterns still cause severe environmental damage. The largest share of these mobility-related problems is caused by everyday private car use, such as commuting. One way to change mobility patterns is through digital nudging in the form of trip recommendations to increase commu...

When presented with the latest statistics on global warming, it becomes evident that ecological sustainability will be equally important as economic sustainability for companies. A new wave of start‐ups shows that ecological sustainability can be integral to a business model (BM) without compromising economic success. Like start‐ups that designed t...

Big Data and primarily distributed stream processing systems (DSPSs) are growing in complexity and scale. As a result, effective performance management to ensure that these systems meet the required service level objectives (SLOs) is becoming increasingly difficult. A key factor to consider when evaluating the performance of a DSPS is CPU efficienc...

We need innovations that enable sustainable economies and sustainable private consumption to meet the grand challenges of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As an essential source of innovation, startups play a crucial role in improving sustainability by creating innovative and sustainable products and services as part of their business models (...

As brick-and-mortar retail increasingly disappears while online retail flourishes, the customer experience (CX) becomes a critical source of competitive advantage. Customers expect the same information, personalization, and availability in a brick-and-mortar store as they do online. While digital technology enables such CXs and enhances the advanta...

Deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) proves to be challenging and resource-intensive in practice. To increase the economic value of AI deployments, organizations seek to deploy and reuse AI applications in multiple environments (e.g., different firm branches). This process involves generalizing an existing AI application to a new environment, whi...

Inherent properties of digital technologies offer promising possibilities such as rapid scalability and exponential growth. However, we observe that firms pursuing digital transformation (DT) initiatives face difficulties in realizing these benefits, as they face competing organizational demands (tensions) in the DT context. By considering digital...

The success of many of the world’s most valuable companies is based on digital platform ecosystems (DPEs). Their performance depends on integrating autonomous, individually incentivized but highly entangled actors using digital platforms to cocreate values. Extant research uses numerous dependent variables to measure the performance of different ac...

Digital business model innovation (BMI) is critical to achieving and sustaining competitiveness in technology-driven environments. In those environments, firms must not only sense changes to identify opportunities but also effectively seize them in BMI. Therefore, sensing and seizing cannot be considered as isolated dynamic capabilities, but must b...

Zusammenfassung Die Digitalisierung des Öffentlichen Gesundheitsdienstes (ÖGD) in Deutschland weist nach wie vor Defizite auf, was nicht zuletzt im Kontext der Pandemiebewältigung zu Problemen führte. Zur Bewältigung ihrer Aufgaben benötigen die etwa 400 deutschen Gesundheitsämtern, eine entsprechende Softwareausstattung, deren Bereitstellung auch...

Continuously innovating business models is necessary to leverage technological progress but remains a complex challenge for firms. Dynamic capabilities explain how organisations ensure long-term success by continuously transforming. Still, how continuous business model innovation unfolds and how dynamic capabilities might support remains understudi...

Der eGovernment MONITOR untersucht seit 2010 den Fortschritt der digitalen Transformation in Verwaltung und Staat in den D-A-CH-Ländern –seit 2021 auch im deutschen Bundesländer-vergleich. Im Fokus stehen dabei die Bekanntheit und Akzeptanz von digitalen Verwaltungsleistungen bei den Bürger*innen und die Nutzung entsprechender Angebote. Mit Ablauf...

Due to the rapid growth of the tourism industry, associated effects like overcrowding, overtourism, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions lead to unsustainable development. A prerequisite for avoiding those adverse effects is the prediction of occupancy. The present study elaborates on the applicability and performance of various prediction model...

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds great potential for firms to create new business models and gain competitive advantages. While some pioneers are effectively leveraging AI, most firms are struggling to capitalize on the opportunities for value creation. Previous research has highlighted the performance benefits, success factors, and challenges of...

Competition between digital platforms is harder compared to non-platform businesses. Fierce platform competition reduces digital platforms' chances of success. Research has identified many aspects of digital platforms and their surrounding ecosystem that influence the success of digital platforms. This research is comprehensive but not integrated....

Digitization has arrived at the heart of global tourism. However, due to challenges such as climate change and overtourism, touristic destinations not only need to become more digital but also more sustainable. Although ever-increasing quantities of touristic data provide a growing basis for innovative digital solutions, destinations vary widely in...

The success of digital platforms can be attributed to the engagement of autonomous complementors as exemplified by e-commerce Content Management System (CMS) platforms such as WordPress and Shopify. Platform owners provide Platform Boundary Resources (PBRs) to stimulate and control complementor engagement. Despite the increasing scholarly interest...

Platform owners have an important role to play in the development and management of their digital platform ecosystems. In this study, we propose and conceptualize platform owner information capability (POIC) as a key instrument. First, we derive a comprehensive definition of information capabilities in traditional organizations by relying on organi...

In recent years, process mining has emerged as the leading big data technology for business process analysis. By extracting knowledge from event logs in information systems, process mining provides unprecedented transparency of business processes while being independent of the source system. However, despite its practical relevance, there is still...

IT artifacts as embodiments of digital technologies are perceived differently by different user groups-a characteristic denoted as the technology's interpretive flexibility. As emphasized in prior contributions, social and technological factors shape the different outcomes of the focal technology. What is less clear is how technology firms can mana...

Over recent years, attention to the urgency of climate change and creating a more sustainable future has risen significantly. However, many people still have not changed their behavior and gone greener even though they know about the severe consequences. Green information systems (IS) provides a promising research agenda to tackle environmental pro...

Partner management is an important success factor for digital platform ecosystems. It operationalizes the platform partner strategy, making far-reaching decisions concerning value co-creation and mitigating governance tensions. However, tools to support partner managers in their tasks have received little attention. Using design science research, w...

In einer immer mehr vernetzteren und komplexeren Welt gewinnen Geschäftsbeziehungen zunehmend an Bedeutung. Jedoch zeigen Beispiele aus dem IT-Outsourcing, dass diese Vorhaben vermehrt scheitern und somit hohe Trennungskosten verursachen. Neben harten Faktoren wie Service-Level-Agreements spielen insbesondere weiche, zwischenmenschliche Faktoren ei...

COVID-19 has created many constraint-related challenges for humans in general and organisations in particular. Specifically, businesses that require physical contact, such as mobility providers, have been severely impacted by the crisis. This paper reveals how mobility platforms and their ecosystem of actors have adapted faster than their non-platf...

Seit 2011 beleuchtet die Studie eGovernment MONITOR die Situation der digitalen Verwaltung in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Sie erscheint unter der Schirmherrschaft von Dr. Markus Richter (Staatssekretär im BMI). Den Ausgangspunkt für die Untersuchung von Nutzung und Akzeptanz digitaler Behördenleistungen aus Sicht der BürgerInnen bildet...

While business process automation through information technology has progressed over the last decades, smart contracts have recently emerged as a promising new means of automation. However, in practice, the adoption of smart contract-based automation is in its infancy, raising the question if the technology genuinely offers a unique approach to pro...

KERN DER STUDIE: Seit 2011 beleuchtet die Studie jährlich die aktuelle E-Government-Situation in Deutschland. Seit 2012 werden Österreich und die Schweiz als Vergleichsländer herangezogen. Zentrale Inhalte sind Bekanntheit, Nutzung, Zufriedenheit und Nutzungsbarrieren sowie die Identifikation im Zusammenhang mit digitalen Behördengängen. NEU: in d...

Although business model innovation (BMI) is essential to remaining competitive, many firms fail at it. A promising approach is building on reoccurring successful solutions – business model patterns (BMP) – as a blueprint for BMI. However, existing patterns face constraints subject to a high diversity and overlaps among patterns. In addition, litera...

Digital platform ecosystems are an omnipresent phenomenon. Compared to traditional modes of interaction, digital pltaforms rely on complementary produts and services that autonomous partners provide . However, adequate measures to assess the output of complementors are not readily available and lack theoretical grounding. Thus, the goal of this pap...

Blockchain technology enables new ways of organizing economic activities, reduces costs and time associated with intermediaries, and strengthens the trust in an ecosystem of actors. The impact of this seminal technology is reflected by an upcoming research stream and various firms that examine the potential uses of blockchain technology. While ther...

Companies that take advantage of digital platforms have rapidly gained a dominant position in their respective markets. While research on digital platforms yielded new insights into winner-take-all markets, envelopment, openness, or governance, no study provided a framework that integrates those aspects and links them to market dominance. We, there...