Erik Perjons

Erik Perjons
Stockholm University | SU · Department of Computer and Systems Sciences

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177
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Publications

Publications (177)
Chapter
Due to disruption from digital technologies, competition, behavioral shifts, regulations, and pandemics, incumbent organizations need to expedite their digital transformation. However, a lot of investments in digital transformation have failed because of poor governance. Prior studies have identified the hybrid IT governance mechanisms that impact...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Michael Porter introduced several concepts related to business strategy and how the latter can be attained. The strategy roughly can be defined as achieving a “competitive advantage,” which is one of the concepts he introduced. Additionally, he introduced the concept of “fit,” which could be roughly understood as aligning various internal and exter...
Article
Full-text available
The paper introduces a new concept – discovery power – that can be used to characterize an enterprise modeling language. The concept is different from, but connected to, the concept of expressive power. The concept is defined as “the degree of help provided by the structure of an enterprise modeling language to expand a partly built model or fill g...
Conference Paper
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Knowledge Management encounters difficulties related to the speed and spread of information production during the modern era of digitization. This results in missing and unprocessed organizational information, which, naturally, leads to missing organizational knowledge, in other words, organizational ignorance. Managing organizational ignorance has...
Conference Paper
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The paper investigates the potential of enterprise models for identifying organizational capabilities, including the hidden ones - those that fall under the radar, i.e., unknown to the management. The hidden capabilities might be critical in an emergency or for expanding the business. After presenting a working definition of capability, the study o...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The paper presents the latest development in modeling tools that support the development and usage of Fractal Enterprise Models (FEMs). It describes the new features in the latest version of FEM toolkit-a software tool that facilitates the development of FEMs, which is built using the ADOxx environment, and presents a new tool-FEM viewer. The latte...
Conference Paper
Health care is a complex domain containing large amounts of data, including clinical and administrative data. Furthermore, the domain includes advanced decision-making utilising the collected data. Various IT systems based on AI technologies, such as machine learning, have been promoted as a way to improve both the quality and efficiency of health...
Preprint
Full-text available
The paper introduces a new concept-discovery power-that can be used to characterize an enterprise modeling language. The concept is different, from, but connected to the concept of expressive power. The concept is defined as "degree of help provided by the structure of an enterprise modeling language to expand a partly built model or fill gaps in i...
Preprint
Full-text available
The paper investigates the potential of enterprise models for identifying capabilities within an organization, including the hidden ones-those that fall under the radar, i.e. not known for the management. The hidden capabilities might be critical in situation of emergency or for expanding the business. After presenting a working definition of capab...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The paper discusses experience of using a formal ontology for defining semantics of a modeling language. This is done for an enterprise modeling language called Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM). FEM significantly differs from other enterprise modeling languages; it presents the operational activities of an enterprise using a combination of classes an...
Chapter
Digital transformation undertaken in many public organisations often fail to result in the anticipated results. Given the recognition of the important role of IT alignment as one of the prerequisites for digital transformation, this study explores how public organisations can improve the degree of IT alignment. Thus, a case study is conducted in fo...
Article
One of the complex tasks for leaders in organisations going through digital transformation is managing the interplay between emerging technologies and organisations' settings-organisational design, business processes and overall organisational goals (i.e., a phenomenon referred to as IT alignment). Despite the recognition of the link between IT ali...
Conference Paper
Managing digital transformation is a complex enterprise dependent on various organisational, managerial, and technological factors. Among others, the influence of factors related to IT alignment on digital transformation is recognised. This study attempts to establish the significance of eight organisational and managerial factors (organisational a...
Preprint
Health care is a complex domain, containing large amounts of data, including measures of physical and mental health. Furthermore, the domain contains advanced decision making utilising the collected data. Various IT systems based on AI technologies, such as machine learning, have been promoted as a way to improve both the quality and the efficiency...
Conference Paper
IT alignment is recognised as one of the prerequisites for digital transformation in the extant literature. To further our understanding of this relationship, a case study was conducted in a public organisation (city administration). Data was collected through interviews and internal-organisational documents in four sub-cities within the city admin...
Chapter
Full-text available
A pattern is a concept widely used in engineering and other disciplines for variety of purpose, e.g. business or system analysis. In this work, we present the concept of patterns usage within enterprise modelling. The undertaking is a part of the larger case study dedicated to Fractal Enterprise Modelling (FEM) development deploying Design Science...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter discusses the authors’ experience of building tool support for a modeling technique called Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM) using the ADOxx metamodeling environment. FEM is introduced as a means for helping the management to comprehend how their organization operates, giving a picture understandable for the management team. It depicts in...
Article
Full-text available
Background Data-driven process analysis is an important area that relies on software support. Process variant analysis is a sort of analysis technique in which analysts compare executed process variants, a.k.a. process cohorts. This comparison can help to identify insights for improving processes. There are a few software supports to enable process...
Conference Paper
Three-decades long IS research suggests that Information Technology (IT) alignment is regarded as one of the pervasive issues among researchers and practitioners. Given the current dynamic business environment, organisations need to foresee external changes and make necessary adjustments (i.e., they need to be agile) while attempting to achieve and...
Article
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This paper reports on the results and further extensions of a concept project that was financially supported by VINNOVA (Sweden’s innovation agency). The project aims, by integrating BIM and GIS, to support traffic safety and contribute towards decreasing the probability of car accidents in general and car-bicycle in more specific. The main objecti...
Conference Paper
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If an Enterprise Model is to be used in the strategic decision-making, it should represent the connections between the elements of internal structure, like processes, machines, people, and the elements of the business environment, like market segments, competitors, regulators. The paper presents and discusses a modeling technique – Fractal Enterpri...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
When designing modeling languages, researchers and practitioners often take contradicting positions. While the former argue for formal soundness and precise specification, practitioners aim for more flexibility in using a modeling language, i.e., by adapting it to a specific project context. The same distinction applies to the differentiation betwe...
Conference Paper
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While there are many tools that can depict a business process on any level of detail, there is lack of tools to depict and/or design process architectures - an interconnected set of business processes that exist or are to be introduced in an organization. The FEM toolkit bridges this gap by providing a tool for process architects to discover the pr...
Article
Full-text available
There are several ways of defining organizational identity and identity management. This article considers a less exploited one, namely, defining identity as a set of structural couplings that the organization has, and identity management as an activity aimed at maintaining these couplings. The concept of structural coupling comes from biological c...
Chapter
This chapter offers a fictitious example of a design science project, focusing on its research process. The first sections describe the research activities according to the method framework introduced in Chap. 4, and the final section provides an overview of the project in the form of a design science canvas.
Chapter
The third activity of the method framework is Design and Develop Artefact, which creates an artefact fulfilling the requirements from the previous activity. This includes designing both the functionality and structure of the artefact. In other words, the activity can be expressed as follows: Create an artefact that addresses the explicated problem...
Chapter
It may seem that the proposed method framework is similar to the waterfall model of systems and software development. This chapter shows that this is not the case and that the framework allows for highly iterative ways of working. We introduce a distinction between temporal and logical orderings of work, where the former refers to the temporal and...
Chapter
Knowledge can be used for different purposes and can exist in different forms. This chapter introduces a classification of knowledge types based on their different purposes and identifies definitional, descriptive, explanatory, predictive, explanatory and predictive, and prescriptive knowledge. A number of knowledge forms are also discussed, based...
Chapter
As in any other kind of research, design science researchers need to address ethical issues. These relate not only to the work carried out in a research project, but also to the possible ethical and societal consequences that can follow from the use of a created artefact. This chapter starts by introducing a number of general principles for researc...
Chapter
Researchers have since centuries used research methods to support the creation of reliable knowledge based on empirical evidence and logical arguments. This chapter offers an overview of established research strategies and methods with a focus on empirical research in the social sciences. We discuss research strategies, such as experiment, survey,...
Chapter
In order to produce reliable results, design science researchers need to make use of research strategies and methods and to base their work on a scientific body of knowledge. This chapter proposes a method framework for design science research that can support researchers in producing relevant as well as rigorous research. Five key activities are i...
Chapter
Within many fields of science, there are well-established principles and structures for communicating research results. Most of these can also, with some adaptations, be used for design science. This chapter introduces the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) structure used for presenting empirical research and shows how it can be...
Chapter
The first activity of the method framework for design science is Explicate Problem. The goal of this activity is to formulate the initial problem precisely, justify its importance, and investigate its underlying causes. In other words, it addresses the question: What is the problem experienced by some stakeholders of a practice and why is it import...
Chapter
The second activity of the method framework is Define Requirements. The goal is to identify and outline an artefact that can address the explicated problem and to elicit requirements for this artefact. In other words, the activity addresses the question: What artefact can be a solution for the explicated problem and which requirements for this arte...
Chapter
The fifth activity of the method framework is Evaluate Artefact, which determines how well the artefact is able to solve the explicated problem and to what extent it fulfils the requirements. The activity addresses the question: How well does the artefact solve the explicated problem and fulfil the defined requirements? This chapter describes how t...
Chapter
The fourth activity of the method framework is Demonstrate Artefact, which illustrates the use of the artefact in one case, thereby proving its feasibility. In other words, the activity addresses the question: How can the developed artefact be used to address the explicated problem in one case? This chapter describes how to answer the question usin...
Chapter
A research paradigm is a set of commonly held beliefs and assumptions within a research community about ontological, epistemological, and methodological concerns. This chapter starts by introducing two well-established research paradigms, positivism and interpretivism, and discusses their role in design science research. We also present two alterna...
Book
This book is an introductory text on design science, intended to support both graduate students and researchers in structuring, undertaking and presenting design science work. It builds on established design science methods as well as recent work on presenting design science studies and ethical principles for design science, and also offers novel i...
Chapter
Treatments are entities of central importance in many practices and applications, including both medical and technical ones. Treatments exhibit a number of intricate characteristics that give rise to practical as well as theoretical modelling challenges. One issue is that treatments can be viewed as endurants as well as events, the latter ones bein...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Though Viable System Model (VSM) has been invented for several decennia ago, it is still not widely use in practice. One of the possible reasons for this is that the formal structure of an organization very rarely, or may be never corresponds to the VSM prescribed structure. This confuses novices and results in erroneous VSM models. To make VSM mor...
Chapter
Organizations constantly need to change due to their desire to improve, or due to the need to adapt to changes in the environment. The use of enterprise models could be a potential aid in this transformation process - by using models an organization can describe its business, analyze it, and design changes. For an organization, models may be import...
Article
Full-text available
The article is devoted to developing a methodological support for planning Design Science (DS) research projects. More exactly, it is aimed at developing a classification of a particular kind of cycles, inherent to DS research projects, and guidelines on how to choose the next cycle in a specific project. The classification and guidelines are based...
Article
Full-text available
The article links two seemingly different fundamental theoretical concepts of autopoiesis and homeostasis and tries to apply them to the realm of socio-technical systems with the use of the Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM). Autopoiesis is the property of a system that constantly reproduces itself. Homeostasis describes a way a complex system constant...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
IT alignment in public organisations is considered to be one of the missing pieces in the otherwise rich research area in the IS domain. Researchers also criticise the lack of studies addressing practical issues related to IT alignment, particularly in public organisations. One such area of concern is the contradictory findings of prior studies on...
Chapter
IT alignment, even though extensively researched in the last decades, remains to be challenging. Previous studies are criticised for two reasons. First, the majority of the studies focus on the conceptual debate, while practical issues that have implications on IT alignment are overlooked. One of these issues is the influence of organisational stru...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
For the last four decades, the alignment of business and IT strategies also referred to as business-IT alignment (BITA), has been recognised as one of the top concerns for leaders. The current digital transformation journey undertaken by most organisations, however, triggered a new approach to planning and executing business and IT strategies as we...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Inter-organizational processes are important for delivering complex services and products. While these processes are important, they are also difficult to design and change. In this paper, we examine how a particular kind of model, the Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM), can help in describing and analyzing changes to inter-organizational processes. FE...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This research-in-progress paper describes an approach to organizational design based on the choice an organization makes when creating business value to its customers or clients. A so-called Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM) is used for this end; FEM represents an organization as an interconnected set of processes and assets. The first step of the val...
Article
Knowledge Management has become a key instrument for identifying, creating and sharing organisational knowledge assets. An attractive means for sharing knowledge is Best Practices (BPs). However, the implementation of BPs raises several challenges, one of which is that the low quality of BP documentation can impede the use of BPs. One way to addres...
Chapter
Full-text available
The paper presents a comparison of two modelling techniques that can be used to describe an organization as an interconnected set of business processes. The first technique is called Fractal Enterprise Model, which is an invention of the authors of this paper. The second technique is a well-established technique, IDEF0, normally used to present a f...
Chapter
Full-text available
Organizations increasingly participate in and rely on inter-organizational processes to carry out work. However, inter-organizational processes may be complex, especially when there is a need to introduce and decide upon changes that affect the process. In this paper we examine the problems that may arise when changing inter-organizational processe...
Poster
Full-text available
Janusmed is a clinical decision support system, developed by the Stockholm County Council that supports physicians in identifying drug-drug interactions. To determine how Janusmed is used in and affects the clinical practice, an evaluation study is currently being carried out that analyzes multiple data sources through descriptive statistics. The s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This is draft. We are working on a journal version, which will be more readable. Many artefacts of today are non-digital or only partly digital. Digital features can often be added to these artefacts to make them more digital. However, for designers, it can be challenging to figure out what digital features to add. In this paper, we outline an arte...
Chapter
Full-text available
The paper is devoted to testing in practice a new kind of enterprise model, called the Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM), that connects enterprise processes via assets used for running these processes. Case study was implemented for a larger man-ufacturing company that has a large repository of process models. FEM was gen-erated from existing reposito...
Article
Full-text available
Though the concept of shared spaces had been known in Groupware and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for quite a while, it did not become popular until the arrival of the Internet and social software. Implicitly, the concept of shared spaces has penetrated many IT-areas, including the area of Business Process Management. Though shared spa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper deals with the problems of a complex organizational system in which not each of its parts is directly connected to all other parts. For such a system, it is important to identify which parts/sub-systems need to be directly connected to each other, and which could be left without such connections. The paper puts forward a hypothesis that...
Chapter
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The pace of changes in the business environment in which a modern enterprise operates requires the enterprise to constantly review its business models in order to survive and prosper in the dynamic world. This exploratory study investigates how to help the enterprise to innovate their business models based on the concepts of fractal enterprise mode...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the long list of cumulative research, business-IT alignment remains to be evasive for practitioners and researchers. As organizations continue to spend a significant amount of their resources on IT to improve the variety and quality of services, achieving and maintaining business-IT alignment is a timely issue. Studies indicate that organiz...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
An extended version of this paper is available: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353772330_Identity_Management_in_an_Institution_of_Higher_Education_A_Case_Study_Using_Structural_Coupling_and_Fractal_Enterprise_Model. This paper presents an ongoing study on defining and maintaining organizational identity of an institution of higher educat...
Article
Full-text available
In today's complex organizations, IT governance is an important managerial challenge. IT governance deals with decisions and responsibilities concerning IT. There are many factors influencing IT governance. One factor that has remained relatively unexplored by academic research is that of organizational culture. This research explores the influence...
Article
Full-text available
A modern organization needs to adapt its behavior to changes in the business environment by changing its Business Processes (BP) and corresponding Business Process Support (BPS) systems. One way of achieving such adaptability is via separation of the system code from the process description/model by applying the concept of executable process models...
Chapter
Full-text available
Digitization is seen as a central force in order to transform the public sector to become transparent, participative, collaborative as well as efficient. In order to realize the digitalization, a public organization need to have an IT architecture that can support such a transformation. Therefore, decision makers in a public organization need to ma...
Article
Full-text available
Paper is in open access: http://bit.ly/2c3RI8P This paper suggests a new type of enterprise models called fractal enterprise models (FEM), with accompanying methodological support for their design. FEM shows interconnections between the business processes in an enterprise by connecting them to the assets they use and manage. Assets considered in th...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In their previous work, the authors have developed a new kind of enterprise model, called fractal enterprise model, that connects enterprise processes via assets used for running these processes. One of the possible usages of this model is facilitating innovation, more exactly, changing or extending a business model used in the enterprise. This res...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The paper is an investigation of challenges in assessing parameters of a socio-technical system. The investigation is carried out using an augmented socio-technical matrix the quadrants of which represent culture, type of structure, methods/technique and type of technology. Investigation concerns a specific kind of matrixes developed for the purpos...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
There is currently a high interest in the potential of open data - data that is publicly available. However, the use of open data is a complex system where the providers of the data, such as public organizations, are not always formally connected to the organization that aggregates the data and the end users. Since it is a complex system, it is dif...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Language technology can improve the efficiency and quality of the services provided by public organizations, first of all, the communication with citizens. So far, this has been investigated in the context of Western countries. We do not know, however, how beneficial such application of language technology could be for the so called developing coun...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In today's complex organizations, IT governance is an important managerial challenge. IT governance deals with decisions and responsibilities concerning IT. There are many factors influencing IT governance. One factor that has remained relatively unexplored by academic research is that of organizational culture. This research explores the influence...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a method that is used to enrich existing architecture frameworks or methods by enabling development of situated capability viewpoints. The method addresses the issue that in many cases viewpoint definitions suggest a singular way to consider and model a domain. This issue is particularly prevalent in frameworks developed by one...
Conference Paper
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Products from traditional engineering companies, such as cars and refrigerators, are evolving to become intelligent via combining hardware, software, sensors, and connectivity/networks. In such products, the importance of software increases exponential. Therefore, new software development units are emerging. This may cause misalignment between the...
Article
New technologies have the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of public organizations. However, it is not always clear what new technologies exists, why they should be introduced, how they can be applied, and how they fit within existing business and IT architectures. In this paper, we examine the potential use of new technologies in th...
Conference Paper
Language technologies and tools, such as text mining, information extraction, and question and answering systems, are becoming mature and should be ready for deployment in public organizations. However, it is not obvious how these technologies can be applied for improving customer service and case handling processes as well as supporting an organiz...