Kari Smolander

Lappeenranta – Lahti University of Technology LUT · School of Engineering Science

The question of how software development needs are channeled into different parts of a platform ecosystem has been addressed by separating owners and complementors and by separating the core and the periphery. This is not necessarily sufficient in business-to-business ecosystems due to their characteristics. Our grounded theory study observes a B2B...

With the continuing application of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in decision-making, algorithmic decision-making is becoming more efficient, often even outperforming humans. Despite this superior performance, people often consciously or unconsciously display reluctance to rely on algorithms, a phenomenon known as algorithm aversion. Vie...

Digital platform research has focused mostly on global platforms, where the users of the platform are consumers. Business-to-business (B2B) digital platforms have received less attention. This study observes and provides an early report on a digital platform for forestry, bringing together forest companies, contractors, and forest machine manufactu...

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing addresses decisions of monetary compensation and the conditions for the SaaS solution to the customer. Efficient SaaS pricing requires sophisticated decision-making and analytics, as well as coordination and compromises between the many business functions involved. The decision-making includes integrated analysi...

Choosing between different integration implementations is an important but surprisingly understudied part of software projects. However, the world is digitalizing rapidly, and the number of different systems that require integration is increasing. In this situation the importance of scalable cloud-based integration platforms, iPaaS and iSaaS platfo...

Despite previous research on well-established digital platforms aimed at business-to-consumer markets, there is a limited understanding of how smaller actors of project-based industries create new business-to-business digital platform ecosystems. This paper explores how incumbent actors evaluate business value as they transition towards an emerging...

Although blockchain-based digital services promise trust, accountability, and transparency, multiple paradoxes between blockchains and GDPR have been highlighted in the recent literature. Some of the recent literature also proposed possible solutions to these paradoxes. This article aims to conduct a systematic literature review on GDPR compliant b...

Digital twins have raised the attention of practitioners in the fields of Architecture, Engineering and Construction, and Facilities Management (AEC/FM). The term broadly refers to the cyber part of cyber-physical systems used for representing and managing real-world assets. This qualitative study explores how Finnish AEC/FM practitioners describe...

Pricing is one of the business and product strategy elements to achieve both financial performance and competitive advantage. The transition towards the Software-as-a-Service model has unlocked new opportunities for pricing software products. Conflicting recommendations from existing studies and industry experts make it challenging for SaaS provide...

Context Pricing is an essential element of software business strategy and tactics. Informed pricing decision-making requires the involvement of different stakeholders and comprehensive data analysis. Achieving both appears to be challenging, and pricing remains one of the most under-managed processes in the software business. Simultaneously, a cohe...

Enterprise systems are developed and tailored in large, long-term projects, sometimes spanning for decades, whereby a network of parties comprising customer and developer organizations, subcontractors, and consultants work together to deliver a successful system. This collaboration is complex; the network and the operating environment are in a cons...

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of physical objects via the Internet. It utilises complex back-end systems which need different capabilities depending on the requirements of the system. IoT has already been used in various applications, such as agriculture, smart home, health, automobiles, and smart grids. There are many IoT...

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of physical objects via the Internet. It utilises complex back-end systems which need different capabilities depending on the requirements of the system. IoT has already been used in various applications, such as agriculture, smart home, health, automobiles, and smart grids. There are many IoT...

ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software-intensive Business: Start-ups, Platforms and Ecosystems (IWSiB 2019) was hosted by ESEC/FSE 2019 and it was held in Tallinn in August 2019. The workshop was motivated by a preceding Dagstuhl Seminar 18182 in which the participants agreed on founding of a workshop series for promoting and advancing the...

Presentation at ICIS 2019 in Munich, Germany.

This study compares the perspectives on inter-organizational integration of information between stakeholders of the architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management (AEC/FM) industry in Finland. Our findings are grounded on semi-structured interviews with practitioners that participated in a project of the Finnish government. Appl...

Informed SaaS pricing decision-making requires the involvement of different business units and integrated pricing approaches. Achieving both appears to be challenging for a lot of SaaS providers, and despite its declared importance, pricing is one of the most under-managed business processes. Small and medium-sized companies do not have the resourc...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business–information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to und...

This article analyses the challenges of implementing a new electronic identification (eID) framework in Finland. We employ the theoretical lens of dialectics to explain how two opposing forces in the form of public and private actors, the government and banks respectively, engaged in a process of resistance and acquiescence. By interviewing the key...

This paper explores how the needs to exchange information across organizational boundaries in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction, and Facilities Management industry in Finland have been satisfied by means of stakeholder integration at the technical, business and socio-organizational levels. We interviewed practitioners about their motiv...

Background There is substantial interest among scholars in digital platforms and the ecosystems around them. Digital platforms are open, continuously evolving, sociotechnical structures that can be sensitive to various changes. Aim We take one-step further and investigate the post-dominance phase of platforms. The electronic identification (eID) e...

In recent years, information systems have not been largely evaluated by their operating costs, but mainly by their strategic benefit and competitive advantage. As blockchain-based decentralized applications become more commonplace, representing a shift towards fully consumption-based distributed computing, a new mode of thinking is required of deve...

Grounded theory method (GTM) has become popular in the information systems (IS) field despite multiple interpretations and disputes about its use and usefulness. This paper analyzes how IS researchers collaborate during the GTM process and how they report on the research process. We analyze a sample of papers from the AIS Senior Scholars’ basket of...

Previous studies on software product management (SPM) domain have provided an extensive picture of the work of a software product manager. Still, little evidence exists about what principles should guide their decisions. A product manager's decision-making has a certain level of subjectivity based on managerial intuition. However, sustainable softw...

The KaPa (Kansallinen Palveluarkkitehtuuri, in Finnish) program estab-lishes the national e-government service platform in Finland. The platform, Suomi.fi, provides a one-stop portal for citizens and organizations to access both public and related private sector services. This research reports a case study of the platform by analyzing it in light o...

In this article, we investigate how practitioners understand external platforms, whose core offering is shared and utilized by a number of heterogeneous and interconnected organizations in an ecosystem. We especially look into situations where organizations wish to extend their own capability instead of building services that extend the functionali...

There has been a substantial interest among scholars in digital platforms and their governance. This paper proposes a different perspective on the phenomenon, by providing observations on non-focal firms' dependencies to external platforms. Using the case study results of Finnish firms' utilization of a monopolistic BankID authentication platform,...

Context: The term “serverless” defines applications that use elements of Function as a Service or Backend as a Service cloud models in their architectures. Serverless promises infrastructure and operations cost reduction, faster software development, and automatic application scalability. Although many practitioners agree that Serverless simplifies...

In this paper, we look how changes and challenges in technical debt and its management could emerge from the ongoing digital transformation. The digital transformation ensues from companies’ opportunities to join various digital ecosystems and use external digital infrastructures to extend business operations and capabilities. Those external infras...

Many organizations still find it painful to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Although ERP projects are collaborative efforts that many separate organizations conduct, academic research has not investigated ERPs fully from this perspective. To identify the challenges in ERP development networks (EDNs), we carried out an interp...

Purpose Software product management (SPM) unites disciplines related to product strategy, planning, development, and release. There are many organizational activities addressing technical, social, and market issues when releasing a software product. Owing to the high number of activities involved, SPM remains a complex discipline to adopt. The purp...

Software development in a small development team is a challenge, as people have to fulfill several roles, which in larger groups would have dedicated people. To help in this aspect, the ISO/IEC 29110 Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities has been developed to help organization and manage the workflow. However, the model presented in the ISO/IE...

New service combinations are constantly needed to be created from the array of information systems and technologies, developed in different times for different purposes, crossing the organizational boundaries. Integration is the key matter in organizations, yet it is also an ambiguous and often a misunderstood concept in the field of information sy...

Many international Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems were developed based on the best practices of organizations in which they were developed. These organizations are usually large, and in developed countries. However, small organizations in other parts of the world are also implementing ERP. Implementing a system based on different practi...

The knowledge about technical debt and its management has increased in recent years. The interest of academia and industry has generated many viewpoints on technical debt. Technical debt management consists of technical and organizational aspects, which make it a challenge in software development. To increase technical debt visibility and manageabi...

This paper presents an initial multi-vocal literature review that extracts ideas for gamification of software testing. We surveyed the type of testing, system under test, role of individuals, gamification elements, challenges and drawbacks, support constructs and tools, and empirical evidence from academic sources and grey literature. Ideas were gi...

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third pa...

PRISMA Checklist. (DOC)

The full list of selected primary papers. (PDF)

PRISMA Flow diagram. (DOC)

This chapter describes a qualitative study with the goal to explore and understand how software process evolution affects technical debt. We investigated three large software development projects with a long development history with the aim to understand how software processes had evolved during the life cycle and how this evolution affected techni...

Today’s enterprise environment is more sophisticated than ever and being able to manage this complexity is not possible without having a planned approach. Enterprise architecture (EA) has emerge as a planned approach to mitigate the organizational complexities and control the constant environmental changes. How-ever, despite the numerous EA develop...

This chapter describes a qualitative study with the goal to explore and understand how software process evolution affects technical debt. We investigated three large software development projects with a long development history with the aim to understand how software processes had evolved during the life cycle and how this evolution affected techni...

Enterprise software development is a complex effort that may last years. Enterprise software is often developed by a systems integrator that makes modifications to a pre-made package or builds tailored software for the specific purpose. The development may include many developer organizations, the user organization, and their different departments...

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor for taking shortcuts or workarounds in technical decisions to gain short-term benefit in time-to-market and earlier software release. In this study, one large software development organization is investigated to gather empirical evidence related to the concept of technical debt management (TDM). We used the explora...

The development of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system starts actually after it has been implemented and taken into use. It is necessary to integrate ERP with other business information systems inside and outside the company. With the grounded theory, we aim to understand how integration challenges emerged in a large manufacturing enterpri...

The objective of this industry study is to shed light on the current situation and improvement needs in software test automation. To this end, 55 industry specialists from 31 organizational units were interviewed. In parallel with the survey, a qualitative study was conducted in 12 selected software development organizations. The results indicated...

Purpose: Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its changing environment. Aiming at eliminating the integration challenges, EA is proposed as a solution. The objective of this study is to survey and analyse the availabl...

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems have increasingly been developed and integrated with other internal and external systems. This paper contributes to the field of enterprise systems integration by clarifying the concept of integration in the context of ERP systems. We investigated integration obstacles during ERP development in 5 large org...

This paper aims to contribute to the growing study of Cloud ERP in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A qualitative study was done in Namibian SMEs to investigate factors that lead to the reluctance of Cloud ERP in SMEs in developing countries. Data was collected from fourteen different SMEs. A Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) framework was chosen t...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the peculiarity of computer game organizations and their human resources. It presents a stage model including four phases covering the growth from demo group to full business. This study extends the research on how computer game organizations are formed and what it takes them to grow to financially...

The number of ERP system integration challenges has recently increased as ERP systems need to be integrated not only with the other business information systems inside the organization but also with the systems of business partners. We examined the development and integration of a customized ERP system used by a global manufacturing enterprise by i...

This paper evaluates the promises of service reusability through an analysis of services implemented in a manufacturing enterprise. A total of 103 services implemented in the case enterprise are analyzed to understand the enablers and obstacles that have led to the reuse ratio of 13 %. The main identified enabler for reusable services was the capab...

The use of lean software development methodology and business model experimentation has become popular in software companies in recent years. Business model experimentation is used to validate assumptions made on a product from real customers before the actual product is created. A minimum viable product is used to test the business model by gather...

Workarounds have existed in software from the very beginning. Being a formalized collection of knowledge rather than a physical artifact, software allows shortcuts in its development process. The shortcuts serve various purposes, like releasing a product to the market faster or postponing the solution of a problem. In this article, we present the f...

This study examines global data movement in large businesses from a product data management (PDM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) point-of-view. The purpose of this study was to understand and map out how a large global business handles its data in a multiple site structure and how it can be applied in practice. This was done by doing an emp...

Coordinating a software project across distances is challenging. Even without geographical and time zone distances, other distances within a project can cause communication gaps. For example, organisational and cognitive distances between product owners and development-near roles such as developers and testers can lead to differences in understandi...

Service-oriented computing has created new requirements for information systems development processes and methods. The adoption of service-oriented development requires service identification methods matching the challenge in enterprises. A wide variety of service identification methods (SIM) have been proposed, but less attention has been paid to...

The paper focuses on the challenge of generating theoretical support for software development, especially when human software developers are involved in the software development process. We outline a model, “Coat Hanger”, for theorizing about development practices. The model focuses on the intended rationale for the actual realization and resulting...

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, allows employees to bring personal devices of their choice into the work environment. Since quality goals vary between employees and the organization where they work, it is difficult for software developers to deliver quality product that will satisfy both parties at the same time. This study presents seven f...

Fierce competition in the software market forces companies to release their product under tough time constraints. The competition makes companies reactive and they need to release new versions often. To achieve this need for speed, companies take shortcuts to reach deadlines. These shortcuts and resulting omitted quality are called technical debt....