Samuli Pekkola

• Professor (Full) at University of Jyväskylä

Public actors are often seen as slow, especially in renewing information systems, due to complex tendering and competition regulations, which delay decisions. This challenge is even greater in multi-company ecosystems. However, when faced with a common threat, the ecosystem needs to unite to face the challenge. This study explores how the Omaolo ec...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is infamous for implementation problems and unredeemed promises. Imprecise and unstandardized EA work practices and various definitions make it difficult to comprehend what should be done and how, and to advance digital transformation. Earlier studies have identified communication and collaboration challenges as one of...

People see the world and convey their perception of it with narratives. In an information system context, stories are told and collected when the systems are developed. Requirements elicitation is largely dependent on communication between systems designers and users. Thus, stories have a significant impact on conceptualizing future users’ needs. T...

Public actors are considered slow in their operations, particularly so when their information system renewal is involved. Processes, such as tendering and actions against unfair competition, often imply that decisions are delayed for various reasons, many of which are unanticipated for software developers. This is accentuated when an ecosystem of c...

Multinational corporations are facing increasing demands on their IT function due to digital innovation and transformation. However, a traditional IT function often lacks capabilities required for successful digital transformation. This necessitates a comprehensive change in its IT operating model (ITOM), encompassing people, processes, technology,...

Nowadays, health-care organizations rely extensively on information technology and systems for providing high-quality services to their patients and exchanging data with external partners. However, these organizations, processes, and operations are vulnerable to criminal activities and digital security breaches, which has led health-care organizati...

Many enterprise architecture (EA) projects face severe challenges and risks and may even fail. Although the problems are well-known and identified in the literature, the projects keep struggling. It is thus reasonable to ask why they cannot exploit earlier experiences. In this paper, we try to find reasons for these issues by conducting a comparati...

Enterprise architecture (EA) adoption initiates broad changes in organizations and organizational functions. However, the existing literature on how and what factors influence the changes in EA adoption remains limited. Our study aims to fill in this gap. We study how the EA-initiated changes occur and what are the factors influencing it. Our proce...

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 • C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot...

Governments and public sector organizations are digitalizing their service provisions to cut costs, improve public administration efficiency, provide better services to citizens and companies, or increase transparency of expenditure and decision-making. Often these attempts are local where each agency, city, municipality, or even a single departmen...

Using electronic health (eHealth) platforms is an approach for reaching more people to get services-for example during pandemics or disasters. eHealth platforms help reduce costs and improve the general quality of healthcare. However, establishing eHealth platforms at the national level is challenging due to legal, privacy, and financial constraint...

Information system (IS) procurement in the public sector is a strictly legislated process where different worries and concerns emerge already in its early phases. They may later lead to hazardous and unwanted outcomes when procuring, acquiring, or implementing the IS. To reduce unsatisfactory outcomes and fears and improve public IS procurement, we...

Information systems (IS) implementation is essentially a social activity. Technical solutions emerge from the humans’ social interactions and cognitive processes and are then planted into the IS users’ subjective realities. These interactions are referred to as narratives, aka stories. Yet the narratives are anything but a simple form of informatio...

Information systems (IS) implementation often aims to ensuring user satisfaction. However, achieving such user-centredness has remained ambiguous and challenging, and the results are not always those that were promised. This may result from several views and fluctuating and implicitly defined concepts. While some premises have been identified, they...

Today, as organizations constantly adjust their activities to meet ever-changing circumstances, continuous business transformation is taking place. However, planning and steering this transformation can be a daunting task as complexity has been built into the organization over the years. Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been widely adapted as a pla...

Organizations often adopt enterprise architecture (EA) when planning how best to develop their information technology (IT) or businesses, for strategic management, or generally for managing change initiatives. This variety of different uses affects many stakeholders within and between organizations. Because stakeholders have dissimilar backgrounds,...

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...

This is an appendix of forthcoming HICSS2021 literature review paper on Package Enterprise Systems. It lists the paper included in our analysis.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is used to improve business-IT alignment. In order to achieve this, the organizations need skilled and competent work-force, namely enterprise architects. However, EA is a management approach without a commonly agreed definition or scope. This makes the education and recruitment of enterprise architects ambiguous and el...

Information systems aim to serve different users and their varying needs. This emphasizes user centered development because users, as experts of their work practices and contexts, have insights how the future system should serve their needs. However, it is ambiguous what is meant by the user centeredness, or who actually are the users. The issue is...

Master data management (MDM) is a data management practice, which attempts to increase data quality and data use across business processes throughout the organization. This paper observes how data ownership, responsibilities, and roles change during MDM development. The metaphor of imbrication was used as a theoretical lens to identify the factors...

Business education has been criticized for being theoretical and distant from the dynamisms of the business life. To answer to this criticism, different types of experiential learning environments, such as manual role-plays, computer simulations, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, have been used. In this paper, we study how a holistic...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is as an approach used to develop digital services. This study examines the patterns of EA adoption in the public sector and the relationship between public organisations’ resources and EA adoption through the lens of resource-based view theory. The qualitative research approach was used. We collected documents from 24...

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...

Public sector organizations are digitalizing their services. This move requires new methods, services, and information systems, and increases the complexity and costs of IT systems. Organizations must transform their processes and services to develop a more effective way to meet these demands. Many public sector organizations have adopted the enter...

Big data is said to provide many benefits. However, as data originates from multiple sources with different quality, big data is not easy to use. Representational quality refers to the concise and consistent representation of data to allow ease of understanding of the data and interpretability. In this paper, we investigate the challenges in creati...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a holistic approach to comprehend the organization's business objectives and processes, data resources, information systems and information technologies. To advance EA activities, organizations need a myriad of different skills and competences both from individual enterprise architects and from architect teams. Howev...

Business management education is criticized for being too theoretical and fractional. Despite the numerous efforts to build integrated and experiential business curricula, learning is still organized in disciplinary silos. The curriculum integration efforts are carried out in separate sections of the curriculum rather than the core. There are theor...

The interpretive grounded theory (GT) study analyses information system (IS) enabled organizational change in two private sector organizations. These two organizations, who are long term partners, were developing a new IS product to divergent markets. The data was gathered through 15 interviews, conducted at the phase of initial rollouts. The findi...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a comprehensive approach aimed at understanding and aligning an organization’s business strategy and processes, information resources, and information technologies. However, implementing this approach in an organization is not an easy task as organizations have their preexisting siloes and fragmented procedures and d...

This paper studies on how enterprise architecture (EA) is used as a tool to assist organizational reform. In particular, we examine how institutional factors influencing organization change process through an EA project. We conduct a qualitative case study and use institutional theory as a lens to analyze data from an organization. This analysi...

Purpose Master data management (MDM) aims to improve the value of an organization’s most important data, such as customer data, by bridging the silos between organizational units and information systems. However, incorporating data management practices into an organization is not a simple task. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new underst...

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...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is an approach to improve the alignment between the organization’s business and their information technologies. It attempts to capture the status of the organizations’ business architecture, information resources, information systems, and technologies so that the gaps and weaknesses in their processes and infrastructu...

Public sector organizations aim to acquire the best possible information systems (IS) and, at the same time, comply with public procurement regulations [4]. Evidently, this task is not easy [5] as the success rate remains low [6]. This lack of success has made the public procurement of IS, its challenges, and different features an increasingly popu...

In recent years, Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been of interest to both researchers and practitioners. However, EA benefit realization has not been focused on much. Even though a few studies have addressed the subject, the results are somewhat fragmented and are subjected to limited empirical validation, particularly from the viewpoint of differ...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a holistic approach that aligns IT resources with business processes and strategies. Thus, EA has been used in the public sector to improve services and service processes. However, when EA programs are initiated, the organization faces several challenges, such as lack of resources or understanding, and radical change...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a holistic approach that aligns IT resources with business processes and strategies. Thus, EA has been used in the public sector to improve services and service processes. However, when EA programs are initiated, the organization faces several challenges, such as lack of resources or understanding, and radical change...

Managing master data as an organization-wide function enforces changes in responsibilities and established ways of working. These changes cause tensions in the organization and can result in conflicts. Understanding these tensions and mechanisms helps the organization to manage the change more effectively. The tensions and conflicts are studied thr...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a holistic approach to aligning IT resources with business processes and strategies. EA often bridges several organisational units and departments. This aspect makes it challeng-ing to establish EA programs as the scope, scale, level of detail, objectives, and resources need to be discussed and agreed upon by several...

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a holistic approach to aligning IT resources with business processes and strategies. EA often bridges several organisational units and departments. This aspect makes it challeng-ing to establish EA programs as the scope, scale, level of detail, objectives, and resources need to be discussed and agreed upon by several...

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...

The requirement specifications are centric in the IS acquisition process, also in public sector. In addition to the regulatory factors multiple stakeholders are often involved in the procurement process. Yet their expertise varies and is often limited to a narrow sector or a specific field. For this paper, we conducted a single case study on an IS...

As a tool for management and planning, Enterprise Architecture (EA) can potentially align organisations’ business processes, information, information systems and technology towards a common goal, and supply the information required within this journey. However, an explicit view on why, how, when and by whom EA artefacts are used in order to realise...

Contemporary information systems development (ISD) is often conducted in a multi-stakeholder network where parts of the development are offshored. This entails several risks and challenges as inter-organizational boundaries get blurred and relationships become complex. Knowledge transfer (KT) is especially difficult; however, it has not been thorou...

Different approaches to enterprise resource planning systems development are often mentioned in the IS literature. However, they are not usually explained thoroughly. The aims of this interpretive case study are thus to introduce two different approaches for developing tailored ERP systems and to explain how they function, i.e., how the information...

The use of Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a tool to achieve interoperable information systems and efficient public administration processes has advanced in several countries. In Finland the use of EA in public organizations has been made mandatory in recent years. While the outcomes of the Finnish national enterprise architecture (NEA) cannot be s...

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...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an approach for facilitating the integration of strategy, business, information systems and technology towards a common goal and mastering organizational complexity through the development and usage of architectural descriptions. The planning and modeling aspect of EA is already fairly well covered in the literature,...

For today's software business and its productivity, software process improvement (SPI) plays a significant role. Organizations that produce software face challenges with the productivity and effectiveness of their operation. The literature lists numerous methods to make the operation better. Critical success factors are defined in order to make the...

Master data management (MDM) provides an access to the consistent views of an organization's master data. Yet the establishment of MDM function, i.e. a department that attempts to ensure master data consistency is not an easy task as several stakeholders have different interests and expectations, among many other reasons. This paper is based on a y...

Tieto on aina ollut kaiken inhimillisen toiminnan peruste. Sen tärkeys yritysten ja myös julkisen sektorin organisaatioiden keskeisenä resurssina on kuitenkin laajasti ymmärretty vasta 1990-luvun lopulta alkaen. Nykyisin tiedon ja sen johtamisen tärkeyttä ei juuri tarvitse perustella. Tarvitsemme välineitä, joiden avulla tietoa eri muodoissaan void...

Enterprise architectures (EA) support organizations in managing the complexity of their business environment and facilitate the integration of strategy, personnel, business and IT. In Finland, the use of EA has recently been mandated by the newly passed Act on the Direction of Public IT Governance. This has forced public sector authorities to famil...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) lack an adequately skilled workforce and managers, since university education generally focuses on large enterprises and their needs. Complementary skills needed by SMEs have been of lesser interest even though several approaches, methods and environments could be utilized. For example, enterprise resource p...

The Delphi method is recommended for exploratory research in emerging research areas. Despite earlier suggestions for using the Delphi method for theory creation, few analytical tools are provided for this purpose. However, Grounded Theory is especially devoted to creating theories from qualitative data. This paper describes an enhanced Delphi meth...

In ubiquitous environments the transition from data to knowledge is becoming significant as more and more data is captured by numerous, usually separated technolo-gies. These technologies are labeled as automated agents, semantic web or ubiquitous computing. As information is data with a certain meaning and knowledge is information with understandi...

Recent development of information and communication technologies (ICT) provides information systems (IS) designers with new potentialities to build systems for various purposes. The ongoing digital convergence refers to and discloses new views on the interactive reconfiguration of technological and social arrangements on a large scale in the contem...

Introducing information systems into organizations initiates a change in human behaviors, which is often perceived as obtrusive and distracting. End-user training may help manage this challenge by getting the users familiar with the system and its functionality. However, end-user training is not easy, nor self-evident, as shown in this paper. This...

In our era of increasing capitalism a cost-based reasoning is often used, also in public sector, for arguing and comparing the costs within and between different institutions. One of the approaches is the total cost of ownership (TCO) where the costs are approached holistically so that, for example, IT costs per workstation, per person, or per IT s...

A system upgrade requires careful planning as its implications to organizational systems might be enormous. Although in IS literature the requirements and process of systems upgrade have been discussed, the timing when to upgrade and what factors guide it has been of lesser interest. Consequently, in this paper we focus on information systems upgra...

Modern society has been transformed by the digital convergence towards a future where technologies embed themselves into the fabric of everyday life. This ongoing merging of social and technological infrastructures provides and necessitates new possibilities to renovate past notions, models and methods of information systems development that accomm...

Enterprise architecture (EA) approach has been widely used for managing the complexities and changes in organizations and their business environments. However, research on potential benefits of the approach is rare and lacks strong empirical evidence. In this paper, we adapt the DeLone and McLean model of information systems success for describing...

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained focus as a driver for bridging and aligning business and IT-oriented views in information system development. The critical aspect of successful SOA is aligning technology and business; without proper alignment, the full potential of SOA will not be achieved. The current academic literature includes onl...

Time Warp and Breathing Time Buckets are two general-purpose optimistic synchronization strategies for supporting parallel discrete-event simulations. However, each one of these approaches has potential fatal shortcomings. Time Warp may exhibit rollback explosions that can cause an avalance of antimessages. Breathing Time Buckets, on the other hand...

In this paper, it is argued that e-learning environments are currently more like ‘buildings’, ie, learning spaces, rather than ‘schools’, ie, places for learning. The concepts originated from architecture and urban design, where they are used both to distinguish static spaces from inhabited places, and more importantly, as design objectives. The tr...

In this paper we report on a case study of the introduction of a workflow management for travel management in a higher education organisation. We aim at addressing two central questions. Firstly, why did a workflow management system (WfMS), which was initially anticipated and welcomed, create complaints that go far beyond the well-known resistance...

Virtual worlds have a long history, and it also includes various technologies. Yet research interest towards them has diverged over the years. It seems that nowadays they are on focus again with the evolution of socially oriented and community-supporting virtual worlds. Instead of technical factors, human factors and the motivation behind the use a...