Boris Otto

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at TU Dortmund University

Sharing and reusing data across organisations is central to the European data strategy and its transformation towards creating a data-driven economy. Currently, data sharing, when it occurs, is typically facilitated through centralised platforms or bilateral integration solutions, which are increasingly failing to meet requirements for flexibility,...

Although data is acknowledged as a strategic asset, many companies still struggle to fully harness its potential. A reported explanation for this failure is poor data culture. Although IS research describes data culture as a key moderating factor for achieving value creation from data, its conceptualization remains inconsistent, scattered across va...

Car manufacturers and suppliers in the Automotive industry increasingly face the issue of optimization of highly complex supply chains that need to accommodate each customer's precise demands, requiring a vast array of parts and information to be available at the right place and at the right time. This involves data sharing between organizations, w...

Industrial data ecosystems are inter-organizational forms of cooperation emerging around sharing data. They arise from a digital infrastructure, giving data providers and data users a platform to share and (re-)use data. Data spaces are among the digital infrastructures frequently associated with data ecosystems, as they supply a shared digital s...

Today's Information Systems (IS) design research projects pursue digital innovation to conquer complex societal challenges. Many of these projects reach out beyond disciplinary and organisational boundaries, as evident in interdisciplinary consortia and academia‐industry collaboration. The design activities in each project differ based on contextua...

Data has become a strategic asset for societal prosperity and economic competitiveness. There has long been an academic consensus that the value of data unfolds during its use. Consequently, many stakeholders have called for expanding the use and reuse of data, including the public and open variety, as well as that from private data providers. Howe...

Data ecosystems offer an interesting avenue to conceptualize the value of data for individual organizations and large networks. The 2nd edition of the mini-track "Designing Data Ecosystems: Values, Impacts, and Fundamentals" is built on last year's mini-track and invited papers exploring a broad range of data ecosystem facets. These include papers...

Many companies have already formulated or are currently in the process of formulating a data strategy to establish long-term target systems for the management and the economic exploitation of data. In this regard, policies and the role of data governance act as anchors, providing the necessary directive for a sophisticated, sustainable, and strateg...

Die letzten 10 Jahre markieren eine große Wandlung in der Erforschung von digitalen Innovationen sowie Neuerungen der Datenwirtschaft. Die Industrie 4.0 steht seitdem im Mittelpunkt des Informationsmanagements. Die immer leistungsfähigeren Technologien zur Vernetzung und zur Begleitung von Produktions- und Logistiksystemen ermöglichen ganz neue Den...

Technical Architecture of Manufacturing-X - interoperable data spaces for the manufacturing industries

Despite investing heavily in data-related technology and human resources, enterprises are still struggling to derive value from data. To foster data value creation and move toward a data-driven enterprise, adequate data management and data governance practices are fundamental. To support these practices, organizations are building (meta)data manage...

Data spaces receive considerable attention nowadays and are at the heart of numerous large-scale European research initiatives shaping the data economy. Their goal is to establish secure environments that enable cross-organizational data management and thereby collect, integrate, and make available heterogeneous data from various sources. Although...

Since the emerging information economy relies heavily on data for advancement and growth, data markets have gained increasing attention. However, while global data economies are evolving and data are increasingly shared among organizations in various data ecosystems, marketplaces for personal data (PDMs) exhibited considerable start-up difficulties...

Since the European information economy faces insufficient access to and joint utilization of data, data ecosystems increasingly emerge as economical solutions in B2B environments. Contrarily, in B2C ambits, concepts for sharing and monetizing personal data have not yet prevailed, impeding growth and innovation. Their major pitfall is European data...

Since the European information economy faces insufficient access to and joint utilization of data, data ecosystems increasingly emerge as economical solutions in B2B environments. Contrarily, in B2C ambits, concepts for sharing and monetizing personal data have not yet prevailed, impeding growth and innovation. Their major pitfall is European data...

Data ecosystems are a novel approach to enabledata sharing on an organizational and personal level. The track ‘Designing Data Ecosystems: Values, Impacts, and Fundamentals’ invited papers on various issues exploring the phenomenon of data ecosystems from multiple angles. Themes included the fundamentals of data sharing, incentives, and barriers to...

Data is an integral part of almost every business. Sharing data enables new opportunities to generate value or enrich the existing data repository, opening up new potentials for optimization and business models. However, these opportunities are still untapped, as sharing data comes with many challenges. First and foremost, aspects such as trust in...

The importance of data as a key resource is a universal theme dominating social and business life. In this regard, inter-organizational data sharing shines in a new light prompting businesses to leverage the potential of their own data. However, it is still unclear what data sharing actually entails, i.e., what it means, what its potentials are, an...

The massive growth of data and the increasing potential of data analytics in industrial production fuel the emergence of data spaces and corresponding platforms that realize data ecosystems and enable data-driven sustainability applications. To leverage their benefits of demand-driven and scalable data integration, the stakeholders of emerging data...

Data ecosystems are an emerging theme in IS research. They represent the complex dynamics of inter-organizational value co-creation based on data sharing. Interestingly, empirical research on the value that the various actors can extract from participating in a data ecosystem is still sparse. We address this issue by analyzing 64 Gaia-X use cases,...

In the course of digitalization, digital platforms are unleashing their full disruptive potential and are already dominating the first industries (e.g., hotel industry). As a result of this success, more and more companies want to build their own platforms and participate in the success. However, building and operating a digital platform involves m...

The role data plays in enterprises is changing as the digital transformation in many sectors gains speed. New business opportunities through data-driven innovation emerge from data sharing in ecosystems. In ecosystems, the interest of the individual must be brought into alignment with the interest of the ecosystem. Trust between participants, data...

The open-source paradigm offers a plethora of opportunities for innovative business models (BMs) as the underlying code-base of the technology is accessible and extendable by external developers. However, finding the proper configuration of open-source business models (OSBMs) is challenging, as existing literature gives guidance through commonly us...

The continuously growing availability and volume of data pressure companies to leverage them economically. Subsequently, companies must find strategies to incorporate data sensibly for internal optimization and find new business opportunities in data-driven business models. In this article, we focus on using data and data analytics in product-orien...

Digital technologies and the associated availability of ever-greater volumes of data present companies with existential challenges. The possibilities of utilizing a wide variety of data force organizations to react quickly. One way to tackle issues of organizational data utilization is implementing DataOps practices, which assist organizations in s...

Design principles capture prescriptive design knowledge to guide design science researchers and design professionals in their design works. In the context of a transdisciplinary team, design principles can also be a powerful vehicle to bridge knowledge barriers and facilitate collaboration among team members with different backgrounds and expertise...

Currently, Digital Twins receive considerable attention from practitioners and in research. A Digital Twin describes a concept that connects physical and virtual objects through a data linkage. However, Digital Twins are highly dependent on their individual use case, which leads to a plethora of Digital Twin configurations. Based on a thorough lite...

The International Data Spaces (IDS) are virtual data spaces leveraging existing standards and technologies, as well as governance models, well-accepted in the data economy, to facilitate secure and standardized data exchange and data linkage in a trusted business ecosystem. It thereby provides a basis for creating smart service scenarios and facili...

Digital Twins offer considerable potential for cross-company networks. Recent research primarily focu-ses on using Digital Twins within the limits of a single organization. However, Shared Digital Twins extend application boundaries to cross-company utilization through their ability to act as a hub to share data. This results in the need to conside...

A data ecosystem (DE) offers a keystone-player or alliance-driven infrastructure that enables the interaction of different stakeholders and the resolution of interoperability issues among shared data. However, despite years of research in data governance and management, trustability is still affected by the absence of transparent and traceable data...

Today’s cloud market consists of numerous providers competing and offering new services and features on an almost daily basis. From an organization's perspective, it can therefore be beneficial to consider multiple providers in their cloud strategy to exploit possibilities for differentiation and specialization, ensure service availability, or real...

Introduction to the Minitrack on Open Platform Ecosystems in Logistics: Business Models and Technologies. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/79933

Digital platforms are becoming increasingly important in logistics to enhance business models and ensure competitiveness. As new players enter from the B2C sector, the need to innovate is intensifying for traditional firms. To compensate for disadvantages, such as missing platform knowledge or a late entrance, open strategies, e.g., shared governan...

The role of data governance is experiencing a paradigm shift as organizations increasingly incorporate data governance to encourage the strategic utilization of data and, therefore, promote data-driven innovation. However, the opportunities arising from technological advancements and novel value propositions based on data come with implications tha...

Classification is an essential approach in business model research. Empirical classifications, termed taxonomies, are widespread in and beyond Information Systems (IS) and enjoy high popularity as both stand-alone artifacts and the foundation for further application. In this article, we focus on the study of empirical business model taxonomies for...

Data are a key driver of the digital era. They shift the strategic landscape of organizations and change how companies approach their business. Nevertheless, existing approaches on data strategies vary vastly and little common ground is visible. Therefore, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy for data strategy tools and methodologies in order to ide...

Although the concepts of cloud computing are well known and used in almost every domain and by companies of all sizes, new ideas and technologies in this area are emerging almost daily. As a result, cloud users often struggle to obtain an up-to-date overview of the most important dimensions of cloud computing and the services that are offered by va...

In the increasingly interconnected business world, economic value is less and less created by one company alone but rather through the combination and enrichment of data by various actors in so-called data ecosystems. The research field around data ecosystems is, however, still in its infancy. In particular, the lack of knowledge about the actual b...

Researchers and practitioners often face challenges in structuring larger design projects and, therefore, struggle to capture, discuss, and reflect on essential components that should be considered. These first steps are, however, of great importance because decisions such as in terms of selecting an underpinning (kernel) theory, following certai...

Zusammenfassung Daten stellen eine strategische Ressource für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Unternehmen und die Prosperität der Gesellschaft dar. Von der Nutzung von Daten vieler einzelner Akteure profitieren die Gemeinschaft, aber auch das Individuum. Beispiele hierfür liefern das Gesundheitswesen oder die Mobilität. Dabei sind die Interessen der I...

In the increasingly connected business world, economic value is created less and less by one company alone but rather through the combination and enrichment of data by various actors in so-called data ecosystems. However, one of the main obstacles to why actors are currently not motivated to engage in data ecosystems is that they are often not awar...

A Data Ecosystem offers a keystone-player or alliance-driven infrastructure that enables the interaction of different stakeholders and the resolution of interoperability issues among shared data. However, despite years of research in data governance and management, trustability is still affected by the absence of transparent and traceable data-driv...

Modern businesses rely on efficient management of their data assets. Data management and analytics have become decisive success factors for enterprises and companies during the last decades. However, the different aspects of transforming an organization into a data-driven one leave a lot of room for scientific inquiry. There are various aspects to...

The position paper underlines the importance of data spaces and though the sovereign sharing of data in creating the future data economy. It has been developed under the coordination and leadership of Task Force 1 lead by International Data Spaces Association of the Horizon 2020 project “OPEN DEI Aligning Reference Architectures, Open Platforms and...

Building and sustaining a successful platform business remains one of the biggest challenges in the age of digitalization and platformization, particularly in the manufacturing industry. The art of managing the partner ecosystem to create and distribute mutual benefits depends on the design of the platform-thus, on the implemented mechanisms and fu...

Data are a key driver of the digital era. They shift the strategic landscape of organizations and change how companies approach their business. Nevertheless, existing approaches on data strategies vary vastly and little common ground is visible. Therefore, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy for data strategy tools and methodologies in order to ide...

Morphological Taxonomies are a widely popular tool in Information Systems to systematically deconstruct an artifact into designable dimensions and characteristics. Subsequently, these taxonomies have engraved in them knowledge about the design of artifacts, i.e., descriptive design knowledge. Most studies producing morphological taxonomies refrain...

In der heutigen digitalisierten Gesellschaft und Wirtschaftswelt gelten Daten als zentrale Ressource. Die wirtschaftliche Nutzung von Daten ermöglicht neue datengetriebene Geschäftsmodelle und Innovationen, bringt jedoch auch einige Herausforderungen und Schwierigkeiten mit sich. Das Data Business in Ecosystems-Handbuch bietet hier Hilfestellung un...

This position paper demonstrates how elements of the International Data Spaces Reference Architecture Model fit to the GAIA-X principles and architecture elements described in the Technical Architecture whitepaper. The view is based on the June 2020 documents, which are the latest Technical documents available. Also, recent architectural decisions...

The ever-growing amounts of data offer companies many opportunities to exploit them. Resulting data-driven services hold great potential for creating unique value for customers and the achievement of competitive advantages. Nevertheless, especially companies in the industrial environment struggle to implement successful data-driven service innovati...

Despite being in competitive relations, organizations increasingly engage in data-centric collaborations to utilize access and provision to distributed data sources. Over time, these relations have evolved from dyadic relationships to the emergence of complex ecosystems. These ecosystems are characterized by multiple autonomous organizations that e...

Current inter-organizational data exchange is restricted to essential information that serves to fulfill contractual commitments. Restricting the exchange of data in these terms, leads to non-consideration of potential improvements in operational processes. One objective of this article is to expose the variety of reasons that prevent these data fr...

In the increasingly interconnected business world, economic value is less and less created by one company alone but rather through the combination and enrichment of data by various actors in so-called data ecosystems. The research field around data ecosystems is, however, still in its infancy. With this study, we want to address this issue and cont...

Freight exchanges are central to the logistics industry, as they reduce empty runs and meet spot demands. To improve their efficiency in terms of automation and enhance trust between the participants, we propose a decentralized freight exchange implemented using public blockchains. With our solution, we also address shortcomings of public blockchai...

Unternehmen müssen ihr Geschäftsmodell laufend anpassen und weiterentwickeln: Globale Marktpräsenz erfordert weltweit harmonisierte Geschäftsprozesse, Kunden verlangen individuell auf ihre Bedürfnisse zugeschnittene Produkte, und Dienstleistungen werden nach den Prinzipien industrieller Abläufe erbracht. Diese Anforderungen betreffen zum einen die...

Data is the main driver of the digital economy. Accordingly, companies are interested in maintaining technical control over the usage of their data at any given time. The International Data Spaces initiative addresses exactly this aspect of data sovereignty with usage control enforcement. In this paper, we introduce the so-called Workflow with Data...

With the advances in information technology, the concept of Digital Twins has gained wide attention in both practice and research in recent years. A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or system and is connected in a bi-directional way with the physical counterpart. The aim of a Digital Twin is to support all stakeholders...

A central goal of doing research is to make findings available to the academic and practitioner community in order to extend the current knowledge base. The notion of how to generalize, abstract, and codify knowledge gained in design endeavors is a vital issue in design science, especially in the strand of design theory. Design principles provide a...

Die enorme Marktkapitalisierung rein datengetriebener Geschäftsmodelle unterstreicht den Mehrwert von Daten. Nachdem die erste Welle der Digitalisierung vor allem auf skalierbare Plattformen im Einzelkundenbereich zielte, rückt mit dem Internet der Dinge verstärkt auch die Verschmelzung digitaler Dienste mit physischen Prozessen im industriellen Um...

Purpose: Digital Twins attract much attention in science and practice, because of their capability to integrate operational data from a wide variety of sources. Thus, providing a complete overview of an asset throughout its entire life cycle. This article develops and demonstrates a Digital Twin, which enables a sovereign and multilateral sharing o...

Since the last few years, the topic of Digital Twins receives considerable attention in research and with practitioners. A Digital Twin describes the connection between physical and virtual objects. However, a unified definition for Digital Twins is still missing. While existing literature reviews mainly focus on the application of Digital Twins, t...

This study proposes a mathematical optimisation model for the horizontal integration of the basic processes of production, inventory, and transportation planning on a tactical level. The model enables planning for cutting, assembly, transportation, and inventory while considering process times. Several items (raw materials, intermediate goods, fini...

The trend towards industry 4.0 amplifies existing data management challenges and requires suitable data governance and data quality measures. Although these topics have been previously discussed in literature, companies are still struggling to cope with the resulting challenges and fully exploit the benefits of industry 4.0. In this paper, we condu...

The emergence of data ecosystems with platform-based infrastructures continuously demonstrate the potential of value creation based on data. In this context, data governance has become an emerging topic in recent IS literature as organizations require a more sophisticated approach over the management of their data assets. However, the implications...

The importance of data as a resource for innovation and value creation is increasing steadily. As a result, organizations must adapt their strategies and develop methods for integrating data into their value creation processes. At the same time, data-driven value is less and less created by one company alone but rather through the sharing of data i...

Among researchers as well as practitioners there is currently a growing interest in the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem approach. However, systemic insight into the structure of DEEs and the nature of interfirm relationships therein remains limited. Drawing on the concept of platform boundary resources, this study offers descriptive insight into...

As of now, the academic community puts increasing attention on the ecosystem concept. Subsequently, a plethora of ecosystem conceptualizations emerges blurring the concept and making accurate utilization increasingly difficult. To address that issue, the study reports on an in-depth structured literature review following established, rigorous guide...

The importance of data as the key resource in start-ups and traditional businesses rises steadily. Thus, traditional organizations need to adapt accordingly and develop adequate strategies to incorporate data into their value creation process. Creating value from data often requires collaboration between various actors with different requirements a...

Continuing digitalization and its impact on business models lead to various streams of literature that emerge parallelly and provide different types of digital business models (DBM's). Furthermore, it results in synonymously used terminology and concepts what leads to a lack of clarity. There is, therefore, a need to find a consensus of the Informa...

Data are a new resource to generate novel value for customers and to extend existing traditional services with a digital component. The manufacturing industry, usually, is characterized by analog service offerings built around product sales and therefore misses new market opportunities. One reason for that is the lack of assistance in innovating ne...

Over the past several decades, digital technologies have evolved from supporting business processes and decision-making to becoming an integral part of business strategies. Although the IS discipline has extensive experience with digitalization and designing sociotechnical artifacts, the underlying design knowledge is seldom systematically accumula...

Im Zuge der Datenökonomie entstehen derzeit Datenmarktplätze als Anlaufstelle für Unternehmen, die Daten kaufen oder verkaufen wollen. Dieses Impulspapier der Arbeitsgruppe „Digitale Geschäftsmodelle“ der Plattform Industrie 4.0 gibt einen Überblick über das Feld der Datenmarktplätze, erläutert die grundlegenden Funktionen von Datenmarktplätzen, br...

The term ecosystem experiences a peak in academic attention, however, its usage varies as well as its application in certain industries. In the world of logistics, the usage of the term ecosystem is not common within academia. Hence, a systematic literature review has been performed by scanning 146 studies out of an original dataset of 2264 results...

The nature of business conduct is changing due to emerging digital technologies and the ever-increasing role of data as a critical resource. Traditional industry branches such as logistics need to adapt accordingly to keep up with change through digitization and to design adequate business models using data. The present article focuses on investiga...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of logistics processes to meet requirements of Industrie 4.0. Design/methodology/approach The authors follow the principles of action design research to conduct a single-case study investigating four logistics processes at a leading German car manufacturer. For the development of a...

As the digitization of everyday life continues, we are perceiving many digital achievements as assisting us in our living and working environments. Most of these new digital services are based on data, or in more concrete terms, our personal data. Making a list of who processes which of our data for what purposes appears virtually impossible. Yet t...

Water, light, plants and animals: the interplay of these factors in a natural ecosystem is an excellent role model for state-of-the-art value chains within economy, as ecosys-tems are characterized by the fact that not one of the systems members is able to optimize their well-being on their own. Any ecosystem has to come together and act as a whole...

Purpose: Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an essential management tool. Realtime KPIs for production and logistics form the basis for flexible and adaptive production systems. These indicators unfold their full potential if they are seamlessly integrated into the “Digital Twin” of a company for data analytics. Methodology: We apply the Design...

Die Digitalisierung des Alltags schreitet immer weiter voran, empfinden wir doch viele der digitalen Errungenschaften als Unterstützung in unsere Lebens- und Arbeitswelt. Die Grundlage für diese neuen digitalen Dienste bilden zumeist Daten, oder konkreter, unsere persönlichen Daten. Eine Auflistung anzufertigen, wer welche Daten von uns zu welchen...

The paper presents the findings from a 3-year single-case study conducted in connection with the International Data Spaces (IDS) initiative. The IDS represents a multi-sided platform (MSP) for secure and trusted data exchange, which is governed by an institutionalized alliance of different stakeholder organizations. The paper delivers insights gain...

Our work develops an archetypical representation of current digital business models of Start-Ups in the logistics sector. In order to achieve our goal, we analyze the business models of 125 Start-Ups. We draw our sample from the Start-Up database AngelList and focus on platform-driven businesses. We chose Start-Ups as they often are at the forefron...

Purpose: Current business challenges force companies to exchange critical and sensitive data. The data provider pays great attention to the usage of their data and wants to control it by policies. The purpose of this paper is to develop usage control architecture options to enable data sovereignty in business ecosystems. Design/methodology/approa...