Matti Rossi

Aalto University · Department of Information and Service Economy

Companies are trying to keep up with the growing number and variation of digital systems. As the number of systems grows, so does the number of integrations, the connections and data flows between systems. This makes integration management more difficult. To improve integration management, companies are using cloud-based integration platforms, but...

Enterprise information systems (EIS) were important enablers of crossfunctional processes within businesses since the 1990s. Often referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, they were extended in line with electronic businesses for integration with suppliers as well as customers. Today, EIS architectures comprise, not only, ERP, sup...

Gamification provides a prominent technique that can be used to provide Immersive Learning Environments (ILEs) for domains, where it is dangerous or expensive to learn in real environments. Especially industrial organizations (e.g., manufacturing, mining, construction) are a promising domain for implementing ILEs that combine gamification concepts...

The rapid growth of the population and the increase in life expectancy put intense pressure on the healthcare systems worldwide. Mobile health applications (m-health apps) can help ease the situation by offering highly personalized services that empower individuals to take better care of their health. To reach their full potential, m-health apps mu...

Climate change and its consequences are among modern societies' most critical challenges. To that end, cities have focused on using information technology in their climate mitigation efforts in smart cities. Considering the magnitude of the problem and its impact on our societies, the need for building climate-resilient smart cities is crucial. In...

In recent years, deep learning methods have become increasingly capable of generating near photorealistic pictures and humanlike text up to the point that humans can no longer recognize what is real and what is AI-generated. Concerningly, there is evidence that some of these methods have already been adopted to produce fake social media profiles an...

The exponentially growing amount of digital information and data analysis increase the ability to perceive the holistic situation of people. This article applies the digital twin paradigm to strengthen a person’s ability to utilize information about themselves by creating a digital representation of their situation to support their well-being. More...

Over the last decades, researchers and practitioners have looked at data as a valuable asset for improving business processes in organizations. However, nowadays, they see data more as a tradable asset that can be monetized. Data monetization here refers to generating revenue from selling data and data-based products and services. Despite providing...

While ethics are recognized as an integral part of information systems (IS) research, many questions about the role of ethics in research practice remain unanswered. Our report responds to this emerging set of concerns with a broad and integrative account of five perspectives on ethics in IS research and design science research (DSR) in particular....

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has progressed and become viable for the purpose of education, learning, and training. Organizations adopt and employ VR technologies to enhance employees’ skills, competency, and readiness through safety training that prepare the employees towards work-specific situations that are dangerous, hazardous, and uncertain...

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...

Purpose Although there is a large body of literature available on the foundations of workplace learning (WPL), little is known about designated research methods that systematically combine intervention, design and learning at work. The purpose of this study is to propose action design research as an alternative method for organizing WPL in general...

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...

Although researchers have discussed big data for years, they have thus far has scarcely touched on directly selling and monetizing data assets. This aspect has particular relevance given recent concerns about data privacy and security and the simultaneous explosion in the use of data for marketing and service-development purposes. In this paper, we...

Data sharing requires researchers to publish their (primary) data and any supporting research materials. With increased attention on reproducibility and more transparent research requiring sharing of data, the issues surrounding data sharing are moving beyond whether data sharing is beneficial, to what kind of research data should be shared and how...

The authors design and demonstrate a process for carrying out design science (DS) research in information systems and demonstrate use of the process to conduct research in two case studies. Several IS researchers have pioneered the acceptance of DS research in IS, but in the last 15 years little DS research has been done within the discipline. The...

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

Advanced workplace technologies are increasingly used alongside traditional enterprise software packages (such as enterprise resource planning) in the workplace. However, we have only limited understanding of how different kinds of technologies are used to dynamically shape work routines and fluidity in a digital workplace. We conducted an in-depth...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology, DESRIST 2020, held in Kristiansand, Norway, in December 2020. The 28 revised full research papers included in the volume together with 7 research-in-progress papers and 9 prototype papers,...

Domain-Specific Modeling raises the level of abstraction beyond programming by specifying the solution directly using visual models to express domain concepts. In many cases, final products can be generated automatically from these high-level specifications. This automation is possible because both the language and generators fit the requirements o...

The potential of blockchain has been extensively discussed in practitioner literature, yet rigorous empirical and theory-driven information systems (IS) research on blockchain remains scarce. This special issue addresses the need for innovative research that offers a fresh look at the opportunities and challenges of blockchain. This editorial integ...

This paper highlights Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) as an outcome of using Action Design Research (ADR) in practice. We argue that ADR is a subtype of Design Science Research (DSR) and a prominent method for facilitating mutually beneficial collaboration between academia and practice. Subsequently, we tie our work around ADR and WIL to the Scandin...

This paper highlights Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) as an outcome of using Action Design Research (ADR) in practice. We argue that ADR is a subtype of Design Science Research (DSR) and a prominent method for facilitating mutually beneficial collaboration between academia and practice. Subsequently , we tie our work around ADR and WIL to the Scandi...

This paper summarizes the discussion in a panel session on the Internet of things (IoT) at the 2017 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Seoul, Korea. The panel explored a research agenda on IoT technology and its interaction with business and society. IoT refers to the ever-growing number of numerous physical devices that feat...

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...

In their insightful critique of Action Design Research, Hevner and Mullarkey (this issue) proposed an enhancement of ADR by juxtaposing concepts from a well cited framework of Design Science Research (DSR) developed by Peffers et al. (2007). In this commentary, we argue that while we agree with some of their elaborations, such as unpacking the spec...

This paper reports on the results of a study of how scholars engage with and use the action design research (ADR) approach. Since its publication, ADR has been acknowledged as an important variant of DSR, and has been adopted by a number of researchers. It has been the methodological basis for doctoral dissertations as well as research projects in...

This work-in-progress paper highlights Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) as a practical out- come of Action Design Research (ADR). We argue that ADR is a prominent methodology for facilitat- ing collaboration between academia and practice. Subsequently, we tie our discussion about ADR and WIL to the Scandinavian school of IS-research and worker partic...

With the rising interest in design science research (DSR), it is crucial to engage in the ongoing debate on what constitutes an acceptable contribution for publishing DSR—the design artifact, the design theory, or both. In this editorial, we provide some constructive guidance across different positioning statements with actionable recommendations f...

This paper reports on the results of a study to investigate how scholars engage with and use the action design research (ADR) approach. ADR has been acknowledged as an important variant of the Design Science Research approach , and has been adopted by a number of scholars, as the methodological basis for doctoral dissertations as well as multidisci...

This study leveraged the advantages of user-generated reviews with the aim of offering new insights into the determinants of hotel customer satisfaction by discriminating among customers by language group. From a collection of 412,784 user-generated reviews on TripAdvisor for 10,149 hotels from five Chinese cities, we found that foreign tourists, w...

This longitudinal study looks at the metaphors used in a public sector information systems development project from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). We examine the use of metaphors by project team members, including representatives of the users, software developers and the managers guiding the project work. The...

Action Design Research (ADR) is a Design Research (DR) method that enriches the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm, by providing stages and principles for designing artifacts and allowing for their emergence in an organizational context. The method has been used and elaborated by scholars, extending the mode of the method and its stages, incorp...

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...

Domain-specific languages provide a viable and time-tested solution for continuing to raise the level of abstraction, and thus productivity, beyond coding, making systems development faster and easier. When accompanied with suitable automated modeling tools and generators it delivers to the promises of continuous delivery and devops. In domain-spec...

Design research (DR) positions information technology artifacts at the core of the Information Systems discipline. However, dominant DR thinking takes a technological view of the IT artifact, paying scant attention to its shaping by the organizational context. Consequently, existing DR methods focus on building the artifact and relegate evaluation...

With the rising interest in Design Science Research (DSR), it has become crucial to understand what the acceptable components of a DSR paper are, in order to get published. Central to this is the ongoing debate on what constitutes an acceptable contribution in DSR-the artifact, the design theory or both? Two camps have emerged in this debate, and t...

This paper focuses on how different aspects of social capital facilitate or prevent clan control in two related inter-organizational system (IOS) projects during the projects’ four years life span. We observed the building of social ties in the projects and tried to understand how trust is build or destroyed in large teams, which are organizational...

In this article we describe the interrelated concepts of method engineering, metamodeling and ontology.

Software specialists are well aware of the merits of visualizations, mash-ups and other methods of enriching open datasets to better serve the needs of their customers. Commercial services based on these methods hold untapped potential for new service businesses. We propose a model for categorizing the different roles businesses can have in enrichi...

Using Foucault's (e.g.,1980) view on discourses and power, this Critical Discourse Analysis study examines how power circulates through material-discursive practices in IS development projects. The findings of this study indicate that one of the key power practices is IS development projects is what we call the 'guaranteeing of equality and rationa...

Formalised systems development methods are used in systems development as a means to express and communicate knowledge about the systems/software development process (Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald 2006). Since methods are social constructs, they embed various assumptions about people and systems development as a social practice (Introna and Whitley 1997;...

So far, we have discovered how to create method parts and what sort of underpinning formalisms are available; now we address the construction aspects, i.e. how to create a full, industry-strength methodology for software development from these method parts. This may be accomplished in a bottom-up fashion, starting with the identification of method...

In this chapter, we present four different examples of the application of the ideas of SME presented in the first eight chapters. Situational method construction often begins with team members identifying ‘on paper’ method fragments from a repository. In our first example (Sect. 9.1), we do just that by constructing a medium-sized methodology using...

In Chap. 1, we used the name ‘method part’ to refer generically to some piece of a methodology smaller than the whole methodology. In the research literature, many names have been used, sometimes with the same semantics, sometimes the same name with different semantics. However, the bulk of the literature talks of (1) method fragments, (2) method c...

One of the least understood aspects of situational method engineering is quality assessment. Here, we are concerned firstly about the quality of individual method parts (fragments, chunks, components) as they are stored in the method base, the overall quality of the method base itself in terms primarily of cohesion and the quality of the method tha...

In the earlier chapters of this book, we have introduced a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in situational method engineering. However, over the last few years, there have been published a number of new ideas that are highly relevant to SME. In particular, we highlight in this chapter just three of these: how SME support service-oriente...

In this chapter, we look at formal ways of addressing situational method engineering, method parts (fragments, chunks, components, etc.) and method construction. In Sect. 4.1 we discuss various metamodelling approaches at a variety of scales, from full method to single fragment descriptions. Section 4.2 is a brief discussion on ontologies and the u...

Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) has proven to be a viable solution to the challenges related to abstraction mismatches between the problem and solution spaces. In many cases, DSM assists in the generation of final products from high-level models that are specific to a domain in terms of abstractions and representation. This automation is possible be...

This study looks at metaphors from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory. Using the theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) we examine the use of metaphors by project members in an information system (IS) project. The data was collected from 22 interviews. Interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, including representative...

Service-based applications are based on modern architectures that require careful design of interfaces and protocols to allow smooth integration of service components. These design artifacts are not only useful for implementation, but could also be used ...

Open data entrepreneurship is required to create novel services and sustainable value networks based on government released datasets. However, the business is still in its infancy. This paper investigates the emerging open data value network structure based on empirical findings from 14 Finnish organizations. The data was collected through intervie...

While previously available methodologies for software – like those published in the early days of object technology – claimed to be appropriate for every conceivable project, situational method engineering (SME) acknowledges that most projects typically have individual characteristics and situations. Thus, finding the most effective methodology for...

In the first few chapters, we have set the scene by defining, both informally and formally, the ideas behind situational method engineering in terms of method fragments, method chunks, method components and method rationale. We have also briefly discussed issues of granularities and interfaces. However, we have to date neglected to answer the vital...

The history of situational method engineering as a subdiscipline of software engineering is around 20 years old. Increasing recognition that a one-size-fits-all methodology has led to increased interest in other options—specifically, the construction of a methodology from smaller method parts, those parts being chosen with the specific context or s...

Having constructed a method using an SME approach, the first enactment should follow smoothly, since all situational constraints have been accommodated during its construction. However, on later endeavours, minor ‘tweaking’ may become necessary. Sometimes, management may decide to ‘freeze’ a base method upon which such modifications are to be made....

We review the initial vision underlying MetaEdit+, discuss its evolution over the last 20 years, and compare it to the state of the art today. We also note the rise of domain-specific modeling and the value that MetaEdit+ and similar tools have offered in advancing this field. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and conceptual advances in...

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise systems (ES) have been in information systems (IS) researchers’ and practitioners’ focus for more than ten years. Yet problems with ERP implementation projects get exposed to the public eye constantly. This makes one marvel why so. In this paper, we will take a retrospective look at ERP research a...

Drawing upon the requirements and software development literature, the present study proposes an integrative contingency model for requirements development. Based on 116 quality journal articles, we analyze requirements development risks, requirements development techniques, and heuristics for how they are effectively related. Subsequently, we synt...

This is the first HICSS minitrack focusing on different aspects of open data services, including issues related to the publication of the open data sets followed by new service development and their implications. Of special interest are novel applications of available open data in various domains, such as, preventive healthcare and traffic.

Open data promises an increased availability of previously private, mostly , governmental datasets for service development. However, research on the topic is only starting to surface. In this article we propose a research agenda for open data service research. We review earlier relevant literature to extrapolate open data as a phenomenon from the p...