Robert Winter

University of St.Gallen · Institute of Information Management

Sir Isaac Newton famously said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Research is a collaborative, evolutionary endeavor-and it is no different with design science research (DSR) which builds upon existing design knowledge and creates new design knowledge to pass on to future projects. However, despite the vast, gro...

Understanding how information systems (IS) architecture evolves and what outcomes can be expected from the evolution of IS architecture presents a considerable challenge for both research and practice. The evolution of IS architecture is marked by management’s efforts to keep local and short-term IS investments in line with enterprise-wide and long...

Despite growing project management maturity, the failure rate of IT-related projects remains high. We investigated four large IT-related projects within the Swiss Federal Administration that were well-managed but still failed. We found that these projects failed because of poor project governance, in particular inadequate handling of project contex...

Design science research (DSR) aims to generate knowledge about innovative solutions to real-world problems. Consequently, DSR needs to deal with the complexity related to problem and solution spaces involving sociotechnical phenomena that people perceive differently and are subject to constant change. This complexity poses challenges to sequential,...

Firms generate innovations to profit from market opportunities, which are newly identified customer needs not yet being met in the market. The rising complexity of market opportunities requires collaboration among multiple partner firms. However, this multipartner collaboration increases transaction and production costs when generating innovations....

Zusammenfassung Transformationsprogramme auf Unternehmensebene zielen darauf ab, sowohl lokale wie auch globale Veränderungsvorteile zu erzielen. Obwohl die Balance zwischen lokaler Differenzierung und globaler Konsistenz als Schlüsselfaktor für den Transformationserfolg anerkannt wird, wird das Verständnis für und der Umgang mit Spannungen im best...

Enterprise transformations (ETs) are critical yet challenging for established organizations. ETs are inherently complex and emergent, involving significant changes across multiple areas of an organization with high uncertainty and volatility. Accordingly, steering committees often struggle with their task due to the lack of timely and reliable info...

Especially in early phases of digital business innovation endeavors, collaborative design sessions are critical for creating a shared understanding, aligning diverse perspectives and objectives, and making fundamental design decisions. As knowledge about the characteristics of these sessions is scarce, existing support artefacts (e. g., methods, te...

Over recent decades, many platform-native start-ups and firms were founded and some are now among the world's most valuable. This study, however, focuses on an incumbent firm transitioning from a long established product platform ecosystem to an innovation platform ecosystem in response to the platform-natives' threats of disruption. We specificall...

Established companies intending to leverage digital technologies are required to innovate their ‘legacy’ business models through organizational transformations. Existing modeling support often leaves a ‘white space’ between informal canvas-style models used in the early phases and (semi-)formal aspect models used in the later phases of transformati...

This paper investigates the leverages of digital platforms in corporate data management from an architectural perspective. We propose the idea of corporate data platforms to address pressing challenges in data management architecture's supply side: inflexibility and inefficiency. Based on a systematic literature review of 14 papers, we investigate...

Enterprise solutions, specifically enterprise systems, have allowed companies to integrate enterprises’ operations throughout. The integration scope of enterprise solutions has increasingly widened, now often covering customer activities, activities along supply chains, and platform ecosystems. IS research has contributed a wide range of explanator...

Significant investments in information systems (IS) over the past decades have led to increasingly complex IS architectures in organisations, which are difficult to understand, operate, and maintain. We investigate this development and associated challenges through a conceptual model that distinguishes four constituent elements of IS architecture c...

Das rege Interesse von grossen und mittleren Organisationen zur Mitwirkung an der vorliegenden Studie zeigt die hohe Relevanz, die dem Identity and Access Management (IAM) heute zukommt. Wurde IAM lange primär als IT-Werkzeug für die systematische Bewirtschaftung von User Accounts gesehen, hat dieses vor dem Hintergrund der Digitalisierung bzw. Dig...

Design Science Research (DSR) projects are diverse along various dimensions (e.g., methodological reference approach, level of contribution, type of evaluation) and they produce a vast amount of information. This poses problems especially for less experienced design researchers who wish to write and publish DSR articles. Since DSR projects hardly f...

This guide is the resulting artefact of a design research project. It is intended for design researchers intending to write research articles. The main strength of this guide is its clarity about what to write (page 1) and how to structure that content within a research article (page 2), paired with its flexibility to accommodate the various DSR pr...

This exploratory study explores how large organizations in Switzerland, mainly from the financial services sector, have adopted or plan to adopt the so-called Data Mesh concept. To provide a terminological and conceptual basis for the report, we summarize our current understanding of the Data Mesh concept and its scaling for large organizations.

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is commonly employed by large organisations to coordinate local information system development efforts in line with organisation-wide strategic objectives while simultaneously avoiding redundancies and inconsistencies. Even though EAM tools and processes have become increasingly mature over the past decade,...

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers a...

Anhaltende und massive Veränderungen im regulatorischen und technischen Kontext führen zu neuen bzw. veränderten Anforderungen an das Datenmanagement grosser Banken. Daraus resultieren Chancen und Herausforderungen im Datenmanagement, für die es hinsichtlich des Vorgehens und der Konsequenzen oft (noch) keine „Best Practices“ gibt. Hierzu haben wir...

Zusammenfassung Obwohl sich die Rolle und Bedeutung der IT in den meisten Unternehmen stark verändert hat, folgt die Strukturierung von CIO-Bereichen (und ihrer Wertbeiträge) meist noch einem funktionalen Paradigma – unter Bezugnahme auf „was wird gemacht“ oder „wie wird es gemacht“, manchmal auch „für wen wird es gemacht“. Eine funktionale bzw. er...

The Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm is highly relevant to the Information Systems (IS) discipline because DSR aims to improve the state of practice and contribute design knowledge through the systematic construction of useful artefacts. Since study designs can be understood as useful artefacts, DSR can also contribute to improving conceptual...

Although Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a mature discipline and widely adopted in practice, surveys indicate effectivity barriers that, at least partially, appear to be a consequence of local decision makers’ non-compliance with enterprise-wide architectural guidelines. Several recent contributions aim at extending the portfolio of EAM...

By acquiring complementors, digital platform owners can facilitate rapid advances in the evolution of their platform ecosystems. We describe how Salesforce has successfully evolved its platform ecosystem through the acquisition of complementors. Based on insights from the Salesforce case, we provide recommendations for acquiring complementors, alig...

In times of business-driven digital transformation, increased design autonomy in innovation projects and agile principles, traditional coordination approaches in the IS domain are facing growing acceptance issues and, consequently, value contribution barriers. Since coordination challenges of IS on the enterprise level (e.g., IS complexity) persist...

The spectrum of changes that enterprises need to deal with varies from simple continuous adjustments of the product portfolio in response to evolving customer preferences, to complete overhauls of the business and operating model in response to disruptive trends. Many research fields and practitioner disciplines have produced analysis and engineeri...

Design science research (DSR) aims to generate knowledge about innovative solutions to real-world problems. A comparably new stream of research, DSR has matured methodically, and is increasingly catching the interest of researchers, specifically for its potential to contribute to problem solving in society and the economy. Since research methodolog...

Businesses of all kinds need to innovate rapidly and adapt quickly due to market disruption fueled by the digital transformation. Executive managers require the management tool that supports them in navigating their company through agility transformation journey by identifying and developing organizational capabilities as means to enhance Corporate...

Existing guidance for communicating design research projects commonly focusses on specific communication instance types such as journal paper writing. However, the diversity of design research endeavours and the variety of communication situations within each such project requires broader and more adaptable guidance. This study therefore proposes a...

Platform ecosystems are complex ecologies of firms with individual competencies and collective objectives. The sustainable evolution of platform ecosystems is thereby contingent on taking advantage of the individual competencies of the ecosystem’s actors toward obtaining collective objectives. To learn more about platform ecosystem evolution and dy...

Firms struggle to meet dynamically changing customers’ needs. One challenge is to navigate a complex search space to find resources needed for innovations that meet customers’ needs. Another challenge is to acquire the resources at lower costs than revenue opportunities to yield profitability. Digital platforms promise to address these challenges b...

Digital platforms (DPs) - technical core artifacts augmented by peripheral third-party complementary resources - facilitate the interaction and collaboration of different actors through highly-efficient resource matching. As DPs differ significantly in their configurations and applications, it is important from both a descriptive and a design persp...

In the context of digital transformation, it is mandatory for most organizations to conduct information systems development (ISD) projects as part of their digitalization and business development journey. One reason that many ISD projects fail is lack of knowledge about which ISD method (ISDM) is most suitable for the project at hand and how to ada...

In the context of digital platforms, platform owners strive to maximize both their platform’s stability and generativity. This is complicated by the paradoxical relationship of generativity and stability, as well as associated tensions. To aid B2B platform owners in their design decisions, we aim to derive specific design principles that address th...

Invited plenary keynote

a) Problem faced: Due to heterogeneous stakeholder requirements, highly diverse tasks, and massive investments needed, enterprise-wide information systems (e-wIS) are often developed through multiple projects over long time periods. In this context, choosing the 'right' evolution paths becomes essential. This is not straightforward because e-wIS co...

To unlock additional business value, most enterprises are intensifying their enterprise-wide data management. In the case of the globally operating bank, we base this article on, a Chief Data Officer (CDO) organization is established for providing data governance and, in a second step, pushing data driven innovation forward. As many employees of th...

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) in organizations often requires coping with conflicts between long-term enterprise-wide goals and short-term goals of local decision-makers. We argue that these goal conflicts are similar to the goal conflicts that occur in public goods dilemmas: people are faced with a choice between an option (a) with a hi...

With an increasing amount and diversity of available data, data exploration is becoming critical for many businesses to create insights for business innovation. From an analysis and design perspective, however, data exploration is still dominated by IT-oriented modeling concepts that make it difficult to engage business users because they are not u...

Aligning local business and technology initiatives with enterprise-wide objectives remains a challenge for many organizations. To this end, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) imposes formal control mechanisms such as architecture plans and principles aimed at leveraging enterprise-wide standards and harnessing information systems (IS) complex...

In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of the knowledge gaps that design science researchers should attend to in order to ensure that their use of justificatory knowledge is made in an appropriate way. We identify nine knowledge gaps between descriptive (cause-effect) relations in kernel theories, prescriptive (means-ends) relations in prescr...

With an increasing amount and diversity of available data, data exploration is becoming critical for many businesses to create insights for business innovation. From an analysis and design perspective, however, data exploration is still dominated by IT-oriented modeling concepts that make it difficult to engage business users because they are not u...

Information systems analysis and design (ISAD) ensures the design of information systems (IS) in line with the requirements of a business environment. Since ISAD approaches follow the currently dominant logic of business, the rise of a new and thriving business logic may require revisiting and advancing extant ISAD approaches and techniques. One of...

Design Science Research (DSR) has many risks. Researchers inexperienced in DSR, especially early career researchers (ECRs) and research students (e.g. PhD students) risk inefficient projects (with delays, rework, etc.) at best and research project failure at worst if they do not manage and treat DSR risks in a proactive manner. The DSR literature,...

There is a growing body of literature that addresses the importance of health and wellbeing in the workplace, and the effectiveness of corporate wellness programs. Following advancements in low-cost and unobtrusive computing technology, an emerging trend in corporate wellness programs is to offer wearable devices to employees. These devices monitor...

Digital platforms—technical core artefacts augmented by peripheral third-party derivatives—afford organizations to integrate resources in networked business ecosystems. Although digital platforms widely differ in their configurations, digital platforms’ dimensions and characteristics to disentangle different digital platform configurations are unde...

For decades much effort has been made to improve project management capabilities. Still, the failure rate remains high, especially for large IT projects. Our postmortem analysis of 15 large IT projects of the Swiss Federal Administration, with an accumulated loss of one billion U.S. dollars, shows that while project management deficits account for...

Perspectives in organizations differ to which extent information systems (IS) should be tailored towards local (e.g., business unit) needs or toward organization-wide, global goals (e.g., synergies, integration). For contributing to overall IS performance success, the harmonization of different perspectives becomes essential. While many scholars ha...

Digitalization and data-driven exploration call for increasingly multi-modal management approaches. We outline what we perceive as a multi-decade conceptualization journey from a business perspective: Having started with modelling functions, data stores and dataflows, having moved towards business process modelling, having expanded to modelling of...

As organisations are challenged with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), developing Agile capabilities becomes first priority for most organisations to innovate and disrupt entire markets. A great number of companies, however, face significant challenges to effectively manage organisational change while developing Agile capabi...

A digital platform is viewed as the central point of gravity within its business ecosystem to facilitate value co-creation processes among its business ecosystem's constituent actors. Considering the specificities of business ecosystems, we spotlight digital platform survival to investigate digital platforms' sustained viability and growth. We posi...

Enterprise architecture (EA) has long been propagated in information systems research as an approach for guiding diverse local stakeholders toward a common holistic perspective. Despite its maturation over the past decades, organizations still encounter institutional obstacles with realizing EA's intended outcomes. Literature addressing this challe...

Perspectives in organizations differ to which extent information sys-tems (IS) should be tailored towards local (e.g., business unit) needs or toward organization-wide, global goals (e.g., synergies, integration). For contributing to overall IS performance success, the harmonization of different perspectives be-comes essential. While many scholars...

The information systems (IS) field contains a rich body of knowledge on approaches, methods, and frameworks that supports researchers in conducting design science research (DSR). It also contains some consensus about the key elements of DSR projects—such as problem identification, design, implementation, evaluation, and abstraction of design knowle...

To the extent that digitalization and data-driven innovation change the way how organi-zations are managed, also enterprise modelling (EM) approaches need to be adapted. We argue that the once dominant process centric approach to EM needs to be increasingly accompanied by EM components which are value centred or decision centred. As EM is challenge...

Marketing research apprises scholars in different disciplines of a paradigmatic reorientation from a traditional goods-dominant (G-D) to a service-dominant (S-D) logic. S-D logic re-conceptualizes the notion of economic exchange. The cornerstone of this reorientation is the concept of value co-creation—a collaborative process of reciprocal value cr...

Simulations provide a useful methodological approach for studying the behavior of complex socio-technical information systems (IS), in which humans and IT artifacts interact to process information. However, the use of simulations is relatively new in IS research and the current presence and impact of simulation-based studies is still limited. Furth...

The benefits of enterprise modeling (EM) and its contribution to organizational tasks are largely undisputed in business and information systems engineering. EM as a discipline has been around for several decades but is typically performed by a limited number of people in organizations with an affinity to modeling. What is captured in models is onl...

Researchers in many fields have adopted simulation to understand a system’s behavior by imitating it through an artificial object that exhibits nearly identical behavior. Although simulation approaches have been widely adopted for theory building in fields such as engineering, computer science, management, and social sciences, researchers in the IS...

Cost allocations for business intelligence (BI) costs create cost awareness, enhance cost transparency, and support the management of BI systems. Although BI cost allocation is highly relevant in practice, the field is widely uncharted in current scholarly research. In this article, the state of the art in scientific literature is analyzed. The rev...

Organizations constantly adapt their Information Systems (IS) architecture to reflect changes in their environment. In general, such adaptations steadily increase the complexity of their IS architecture, thereby negatively impacting IS efficiency and IS flexibility. Based on a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective, we present a more differenti...

Conducting Design Science Research (DSR) has many risks. Extant literature, such as the Risk Management Framework for Design Science Research (RMF4DSR), provides advice for identifying risks, but provides few suggestions for specific treatments for the kinds of risks that potentially plague DSR. This paper analyses known DSR risks from RMF4DSR, aug...

Smart meters are the backbone of modern electricity metering and an important enabler of reaching energy efficiency targets. The implementation of new metering infrastructure is, however, making little progress and is often focused on technical aspects only. Additionally, existing smart metering information systems do not yet exploit the possibilit...

In this paper, we define three key performance indicators (KPI) to measure the health of application portfolios (AP) and use the business capability map (BCM) as a visualization lens. Based on a literature review of AP management and BCM practices, we conduct a case study with a large European automotive company to develop three KPIs related to AP...

The ongoing integration of Information Technology (IT) into various areas of our lives has led to a plethora of digital products and services. To survive competition in the long run, these offerings not only have to keep up with constant technological develop- ments, but also have to adapt from a business point of view. Managers of these digital bu...

The identification of a problem, its causes and its consequences are integral parts of designing useful solutions in Design Science Research (DSR). Many problems addressed in DSR are of a socio-technical nature, and they are collaboratively solved in multidisciplinary teams. Accordingly, analysis techniques are needed which integrate diverse perspe...

Information systems (IS) research has long been promoting the necessity of aligning local IS investments in organizations with their enterprise-wide objectives. One of the prominent means to realize such an alignment are mechanisms that coordinate various stakeholders in different organizational entities. Despite its prominent origins and manifold...

Changing demands in society and the limited capabilities of health systems have paved the way for robots to move out of industrial contexts and enter more human-centered environments such as health care. We explore the shared beliefs and concerns of health workers on the introduction of autonomously operating service robots in hospitals or professi...

Referring to the editorial paper on the launch of this journal, this commentary focuses on the enabling role of models for Organizational Design & Enterprise Engineering (OD&EE). Three aspects are discussed: (1) why should OD&EE be enabled by models only? Can models provide a sufficient coverage of the multi-faceted challenges of OD&EE, or should a...

This study adopts two distinct perspectives, employer and employee, to analyze the affordances of digital occupational health (DOH) systems and their appropriation. Data were collected in the context of a European collaborative research project that aims at developing a data integration infrastructure for context aware health surveillance at the wo...

In this chapter, we look back on the results presented in this book. As mentioned at the start of this book, the field of ACET is rather rich and diverse. As such, this book could only provide a humble beginning towards the creation of a more complete understanding of ACET and the development of an integrated set of instruments supporting ACET in p...

In this chapter we address the fact that not all ACET problems are equal, and ACET solutions therefore need to be configured to address the specifics of the respective ACET problem. We approach this configuration problem by the means of situational method engineering. We find that the two most important differences of ACET problem situations result...

In this we present a reference framework, more specifically a catalogue of capabilities, needed for doing ACET. As such, it also provides guidance on which elements/artefacts of enterprise architecture can be used to support which aspects of enterprise architecture. For architects, it shows where their services might generate value, if requested. F...

In this chapter we report on the case of a globally operating insurance company that has leveraged enterprise architecture management to support business transformations. In order to do so, the company has developed enterprise architecture management capabilities that help the business structuring the business transformation particularly in the ear...

As a primary factor of technological innovation, process orientation contributes significantly to an organization's overall productivity and quality improvement. While this proposition has been confirmed for profit-oriented organizations of various industries, little research exists that validates the same statement in the healthcare sector. This p...

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has long been propagated in research and practice as an approach for keeping local information systems projects in line with enterprise-wide, long-term objectives. EAM literature predominantly promotes strictly governed and centralized coordination mechanisms to achieve the promised alignment contributions....

Owing to the rapid and unrelenting digitalization of business ecosystems, digital infra-structure—as a new information technology artifact to conceptualize and realize interconnected information system collectives—has drawn considerable attention in information systems research. Building on the extant body of knowledge, this study synthesizes and i...

Als soziotechnische Systeme verbinden analytische Informationssysteme genauso wie andere Informationssysteme menschliche und technische Aufgabenträger im Kontext von Organisationen. Analytische Informationssysteme sind fast immer ein komplexes Konglomerat aus Komponenten zwischen den beiden Extrema „Entscheidungsunterstützung einzelner Personen für...

Enterprise modelling (EM) as a discipline has been around for several decades with a huge body of knowledge on EM in academic literature. The benefits of modelling and its contributions to organizational tasks are largely undisputed. Thus, from an inside-out perspective, EM appears to be a mature and established discipline. However, for initiating...

Establishing Architectural Thinking in (Large) Organizations