| 1. |
- Allmér, Hans, Lecturer, 1958-
(author)
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Servicescape for Digital Wellness Services for Young Elderly
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this thesis digital wellness services (DWSs) are in focus. The DWSs are services provided through digital devices, such as smartphones, bracelets, and tablets, by using digital environments such as Internet, cloud services, and websites. They can provide users with information that has an impact on their wellness, such as pulse, nutrition, and training guidance. The focus for this work on DWSs is on the age group of young elderly (60 – 75 years old). They belong to a group who were born long before digital devices and environments emerged and this factor may affect their motivation and willingness to use and benefit from DWSs.This thesis offers a framework for a digital servicescape that enables young elderly to benefit from DWSs. DWSs are produced and offered in digital servicescapes, where the interaction between the service providers and the service users occurs. The interaction can take place in different spaces like fitness studios, shopping malls or banks. DWSs for large groups of young elderly will require an ecosystem of stakeholders to develop, distribute, maintain, support, and further develop these services. An ecosystem builds on policies, strategies, processes, information, technologies, applications and stakeholders, and includes people who build, sell, manage and use the system. In order to understand the ecosystem, it is necessary to have a holistic approach to work out how its context, technology, stakeholders, and use interact with each other. A digital servicescape offers the conceptual basis for the ecosystem to form, evolve, and survive and produces platforms on which it is easy, effective, and productive to access and use DWSs.The described interaction between digital servicescape and DWSs for improved health leads to the research question: How can a digital servicescape enhance young elderly’s use of Digital Wellness Services (DWSs)?In order to answer the research question, the thesis presents different approaches that influence the young elderly’s capabilities and willingness to use and benefit from DWSs. If the young elderly follow recommendations to apply DWSs they will benefit in terms of healthier aging, reduced ill health, and a better quality of life. For developers and providers of DWSs development work will open up business opportunities if they understand the needs and demands of the young elderly. In addition, DWSs can contribute to significant health, social, and economic benefits for society in general. Proactive wellness programs for young elderly will have cumulative effects on the conditions for good health. The digital servicescape is a conceptual framework for future work on actually building the necessary platforms for DWSs.The work on this thesis follows an explorative approach. The data collection was carried out through surveys, literature review, and focus groups after which the data was sorted, analysed and interpreted. As the work progressed, a need arose to obtain insights from additional perspectives with the consequence that the additional data contributed to a deeper knowledge of the young elderly, DWSs and digital servicescape.The young elderly are, as a group, a very large market consisting of almost 100 million people in Europe alone. For the young elderly, digitalisation has been a part of their lives and its development has provided them with new opportunities to communicate. To them the interface on their digital device is where the interaction with a service provider occurs. Behind the interface, a digital servicescape and an ecosystem provide the necessary tools for the young elderly to achieve the wellness they seek. Nevertheless, to understand the target group it is important to consider four wellness dimensions: i) physical wellness, ii) social wellness, iii) emotional wellness, and iv) intellectual wellness. Together, the four dimensions form a holistic wellness approach to motivate young elderly to use DWSs. The research results show that the young elderly need to be motivated to adopt the services offered. Motivation that affects the young elderly is both intrinsic and extrinsic and this should be considered when developing and providing DWSs and digital servicescapes. Therefore, the service providers have to meet the expectations, needs, and demands of the young elderly and develop services that are suited for the target group. However, this is not enough, as this research shows that the young elderly want to be in a context where they feel safe.Information systems offer a basis for communication and interaction with and through digital devices such as smartphones, tablets, and bracelets. The Internet constitutes a platform for service and social interaction. Services offered on the Web, make it possible to do shopping, be entertained, entertain, and be involved in education, research, business and much more. The internet forms an important part of the infrastructure for DWSs and digital servicescapes.An efficient and well-designed DWS and its servicescape can create a win-win-win situation. The first part is the young elderly who can benefit from DWSs by increasing their chances of a longer, healthier, and happier life and thereby achieve wellness. The second win situation concerns the service developers and providers who can build a business by designing well-working DWSs aimed at the young elderly. Finally, the third win situation is about family, friends, and society. Well-designed DWSs can be beneficial for family and friends to help the young elderly to achieve wellness and require less support from family and friends. For society in general, there are financial benefits, as healthier and happier young elderly will reduce the demand for health care and support. Together the three win-win-win scenarios build an opportunity for a better tomorrow for all concerned. This thesis has created a foundation for continued research, testing, and development of DWSs and digital servicescapes. It has shown that there is a need for deeper understanding of the benefits a well-designed servicescape for DWSs can bring to people in general and to the group of young elderly in particular. Furthermore, there is a need for further research in the win-win-win situations when young elderly get access to digital wellness devices. A particularly interesting avenue of research would be to investigate how that digital servicescape could be designed and whether society should provide devices free of charge, at discount or with some other business model.
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| 2. |
- Carlsson, Linnea
(author)
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Social Aspects of Strategizing Industrial Digitalization
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis aims to contribute to understanding how contemporary Swedish manufacturing organizations can strategize industrial digitalization with an emerging focus on social aspects. It complements earlier research by highlighting Swedish manufacturing organizations as they stand at the intersection of Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0.The thesis is a longitudinal case study of interviews and focus groups between early 2019 and spring 2023. The case study follows an explorative approach to give texture to industrial digitalization and to understand the social aspects of strategizing industrial digitalization. It is limited to the Swedish context and the characteristics of original equipment manufacturers.The thesis contributes by texturizing industrial digitalization through three social aspects, which are argued to be a way for manufacturing organizations to give shape to industrial digitalization. The social aspects elaborated on and presented in this thesis are: to look beyond digital technologies, to formalize a shared understanding, and to transcend organizational structures. These social aspects are thematic but also interlinked. Together, these social aspects bring insights into how managers can guide the organizational capabilities to ensure synergy between an organization’s actions and objectives when strategizing industrial digitalization. Strategizing industrial digitalization should, therefore, be texturized by each organization to define and redefine its organizational capabilities. This means each organization's social aspects are unique, making the manufacturing organizations' capabilities unique.
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| 3. |
- Habibipour, Abdolrasoul, 1979-
(author)
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User engagement in Living Labs : Issues and concerns
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- User engagement and the participatory design approach are well-established in information systems research for many years, and several studies have investigated the challenges of user engagement in the innovation processes. The majority of these studies have discussed participatory design activities – specifically user engagement –in an organizational context. From this perspective, user engagement within an organization employs (relatively) mature technology, but the users are exclusively employees with certain levels of expertise and commitment. Therefore, the full spectrum of users’ perspectives is widely neglected. Accordingly, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate and discuss how the process of voluntary user engagement in real-life contexts (in this study, living labs) is shaped when the innovations are not yet mature. The objective is to propose a framework that addresses issues of sustainable user engagement and commitment by including the users’ perspectives. To this end, the following research questions are further explored:RQ1: What aspects of innovation have an impact on the process of user engagement?RQ2: What aspects of the engagement context have an impact on the process of user engagement?RQ3: What aspects related to the users themselves have an impact on the process of user engagement?In order to meet the purpose of this study, the living lab was used as the context of participatory design activities in three different studied cases. The first living lab case was called “USEMP” and concerned testing and evaluation of a digital innovation with voluntary users. The second living lab case, “UNaLab”, incorporated ten European cities, aiming to develop nature-based solutions to problems in these cities following a living lab approach. The third living lab case, “U4IoT”, was designed to facilitate the engagement of five European Large-Scale Pilots with (current and future) users throughout the use and adoption of the Internet of things (IoT).This thesis is based on a qualitative interpretive case study approach. Beyond conducting two rounds of literature review, this research used multiple data collection methods within the context of the studied living lab cases. These included two rounds of semi-structured interviews with the living lab and innovation experts (24 interviews), four international workshops with 62 participants, and two rounds of open-ended questionnaires with 41 participants. A high-level analysis of the results from the three cases was also conducted through qualitative data coding, in which the results of all appended papers were reinterpreted, reorganized, synthesized and presented.This study contributes to the research on participatory design in the information systems research field by focusing on voluntary user engagement in living labs when the innovation is not yet mature. In so doing, this dissertation provides the Plan–Act–Reflect user engagement framework, which investigates the issues of user engagement and incorporates the perspectives of both users and innovation and living lab experts. The analysis of the results illustrated that user engagement in the living lab context is not a linear process with pre-determined entry and exit points. Instead, it is an iterative process characterized by complex interplay between different engagement phases, including cognitive engagement (plan), realize engagement (act), and engagement commitment (reflect). The results of this study could help participatory design practitioners, living lab organizers, project planners and decision makers on a larger scale – such as that of urban living labs – to understand not only how to engage users in the innovation processes but also how to keep them engaged. This may be accomplished through every part of the process, from user preparation to implementation to testing and adoption of innovations.
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| 4. |
- Murmann, Patrick
(author)
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Information at Your Fingertips : Facilitating Usable Transparency via Privacy Notifications
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The General Data Protection Regulation stipulates legal rights of transparency and intervenability. Transparency provides data subjects with insight into how their personal data have been processed, clarifying what consequences will or may arise due to the processing of their data, whereas intervenability enables them to intervene in the process. Technological artefacts, transparency-enhancing tools (TETs) serve the purpose of conveying respective information precisely and intelligibily. However, despite being a prerequisite for transparency, many TETs available today lack usability in that they do not stringently reflect the needs of their users, which raises the question as to whether individual TETs fulfil their designated purpose.The objective of this dissertation is to systematically apply principles pertaining to human-centred design to ascertain the qualities necessary to design TETs that facilitate transparency and advise means of intervenability with regard to the needs of their target audience. We classify the state of the art of usable TETs published in the literature and discuss the gaps therein. Contextualising our research in the domain of personal health tracking, we investigate to what extent customisation can help accommodate the needs of users of TETs. We introduce privacy notifications as a conceptual means to inform data subjects about facts worthy of their attention, and examine the immanent properties required to accomplish actual usability. We categorise the characteristics of privacy notifications in terms of what insight they convey, and how respective facts need to be presented to facilitate informed decision-making on the recipient's part. Based on findings obtained via quantitative and qualitative user studies, we elicit concomitant factors related to the parameterisation of privacy notifications. We present the prototypical implementation of TETs whose iterative evaluation provides us with a catalogue of design requirements that demonstrably reflect the needs of their users.
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| 5. |
- Norström, Livia, 1975-
(author)
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Social Media as Sociomaterial Service : On Practicing Public Service Innovation in Municipalities
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Governments are in need to innovate public service. They struggle with complex societal problems, decreased citizen trust and the work of adapting to new demands related to how service should be delivered to fit contemporary living. Inspired by success stories from the private sector's "open innovation" approaches, governments are complementing internal competence with knowledge resources of external actors such as citizens. One increasingly growing strategy for knowledge expansion beyond government boundaries has been to use social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This strategy has been shown to be especially effective at a local government level (henceforth municipality) where citizens are geographically close to the government and where government manages activities that citizens rely on in their daily lives.Despite an expansive rise of social media use in municipalities, and efforts to see beyond a traditional and New Public Management approach to public service, there is little knowledge about the participatory and innovative capacity of social media in a government context. This knowledge gap is reflected in researchers' and municipal administrators' uncertainty as to how to make use of social media for improvement of public service and how to handle tensions about what is possible to do with social media and what is legitimate to do as a public servant.The aim of the thesis is thus to map, unpack and conceptualize social media practice by municipal communicators to understand how tensions and dynamics between social media mechanisms and government rationales are shaping the practice and how new emerging practices can be understood as public service innovation. The research questions of the thesis are: RQ1: How are social mediamechanisms supporting different public service rationales?; RQ2: How is public service enacted in the social media practice by municipal communicators?; RQ 3: How can social media practice by municipal communicators be understood as public service innovation?With an engaged scholarship research approach, related research on social medialogic, e-government, e-governance and digital public service innovation, and with the help of the theoretical perspectives "service innovation," "practice perspective" and "sociomateriality," the thesis contributes extended insights into how social media platform mechanisms support different government rationales in processes of sociomaterial service, and how such practice can be understood as creative processes towards public service innovation.As a practical contribution I propose that both communicators and managers in government engage together in networks of others working with social media and to discuss for instance the mission of the government in relation to the aim of using social media, what tensions arise in the social media practice and why, and how algorithms are shaping the social media practice.
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| 6. |
- Ofe, Hosea A., 1984-
(author)
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Orchestrating emerging digital ecosystems : investigating the establishment of an open data platform in the Swedish public transport industry
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Digital platforms are affecting most contemporary organizations as they mediate an increasing range and number of interactions in their ecosystems. While the discourse on digital platform ecosystems has gained in interest over the years, it often revolves around dominant global firms and how they utilize their control over governance and architecture configurations to exercise power in shaping trajectories. This dissertation seeks to provide insights into the processes through which new digital platforms ecosystems are established by identifying challenges in orchestrating emerging digital ecosystems and approaches through which these can be navigated. To this end, my research focused on the establishment of an open data platform in the public transport industry in Sweden.My theoretical and empirical investigation provides three contributions to our understanding of orchestration of emerging digital ecosystems. The first contribution is the identification of key challenges in orchestrating an emerging ecosystem through a review of extant literature. The review suggests that challenges in orchestrating emerging ecosystems revolve around three goals: (1) attracting and generating network effects; (2) control and coordination; and (3) creating and capturing value. Thus, whether ecosystem establishment is successful or not depends in large part on how providers are able to address these challenges. The identification of challenges and remedies could be helpful for practitioners and scholars when assessing and diagnosing emerging ecosystems. However, I suggest that the different challenges and proposed solutions should not be treated as fixed and isolated guidelines in assessing ecosystems. Instead, providers should consider the challenges holistically in their ecosystem since there are interplays and interactions between their underlying socio-technical aspects. The second contribution is a conceptualization of the nature of orchestration in emerging digital ecosystems. I demonstrate that orchestration in an emerging ecosystem is inherently embroiled in a web of fragile power relationships among actors, unbounded participation, unbounded control, emergent outcomes, and persistent competing concerns. The third contribution of my thesis is the practical implications for how providers can approach orchestration and address challenges in emerging digital ecosystems. The fragile nature of emerging ecosystems suggests that orchestration is not limited to arm´s length measures but also stands to benefit from social interactions and relationship-building among actors with distinctive interests and understanding of their own rights.
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| 7. |
- Osman, Ahmed M. Shahat
(author)
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Smart Cities and Big Data Analytics : A Data-Driven Decision-Making Perspective
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The phenomenon of digitalization has led to the emergence of a new term—big data. Big data refers to the vast volumes of digital data characterized by its volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value. The accumulation of enormous amounts of digital data has encouraged academics to develop appropriate technologies and algorithms to manage and analyze these data in order to leverage the embedded relationships within the data to support decision-making. This approach has revolutionized the organizational strategies of most business areas by digitally transforming business operations and decision-making processes.A “smart city” is a new concept that depends primarily on digitization and big data analysis. The aim of a smart city is to tackle the challenges of ever-increasing urbanization by utilizing atypical approaches. The utilization of big data analysis in smart cities has been investigated thoroughly in the literature from various aspects, such as those related to recommended technologies and the domains of applications. A smart city is a compound system with multi-domain attributes in which the citizens represent key participants in decision-making. However, harnessing big data analysis to support decision-making in the smart city context is rarely approached in academia. The infrequency of this type of research was sufficient to motivate this interesting research. Two research questions drive this thesis: RQ1: What are the challenges of utilizing big data analytics (BDA) to enable decision-making in smart cities? RQ2: What are the design principles of the BDA framework in the context of smart cities? To address these research questions, numerous research methods were applied, including a systematic literature review, design science research, use case, and case study. In addition, internationally acknowledged information systems databases were searched to collect quality scholarly articles and conference proceedings: ACM Digital Library, IEEE, SCOPUS, Springer Link, INSPEC, INSPEC, and Web of Science. A freely published dataset for experimental purposes on Yelp (www.yelp.com) was used for the use case experiment. Lastly, the case study was based on data from a national Egyptian digital transformation project called Nafeza.The research findings revealed the need to introduce an inventive framework for exploiting big data analysis in smart city applications. The main contribution of this research is the proposal of a novel framework for utilizing big data analytics in smart cities. The proposed framework, the Smart Cities Data Analytics Panel (SCDAP), is a domain-independent big data analysis framework. It compiles the relevant design principles mentioned in the literature, particularly those that are distinctive to smart cities. The design principles of SCDAP are founded on the literature review, use case, and case study methodologies and are the main contribution of this research.As the four papers that formed the foundation of this thesis combine theoretical and practical research, the contributions of this research can be of direct benefit to academic researchers in this field and practitioners of smart city projects.
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| 8. |
- Padyab, Ali
(author)
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Exploring Impacts of Secondary Information Use on Individual Privacy
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Information collected from individuals via online social networks and Internet of things devices can be used by institutions and service providers for different business purposes to tailor and customize their services, which is defined as secondary use of information. Although the literature on secondary use is well developed, prior studies have largely focused on direct use of information such as those instances of information use that do not stem from data mining. Advances in data mining and information-processing techniques facilitate discovery of customers’ and users’ behaviors and needs. Research shows that individuals’ behavior can be inferred with high accuracy from their shared information, which may in turn jeopardize privacy. A recent scandal of Cambridge Analytica using about 87 million Facebook profiles to target those users with customized micro-targeted political ads has created public outrage and raised criticisms of secondary use. Given this background, the purpose of this thesis is to explore impacts of organizations’ and service providers’ secondary use of personal information in order to draw conclusions related to how individuals’ attitudes are formed and what role secondary use plays in managing privacy.This research investigates user awareness and attitudes towards potential secondary uses of information. To pursue this, a multi-method qualitative approach using a descriptive questionnaire with 1000 European citizens and a total of 10 focus groups with 43 participants was employed. A qualitative content analysis using both inductive and deductive approaches was conducted to analyze the results. The conceptual framework employed in this thesis was genres of disclosure.The research results suggest that user awareness of the potential for indirect personal information disclosure was relatively low. It was consequently found that participant attitudes toward privacy and disclosure shifted from affective to cognitive when they experienced firsthand the potential inferences that could be made from their own data. Generally, the participant users only considered their direct disclosure of information; through observing potential indirect inferences about their own shared contents and information, however, the participants became more aware of potential infringements on their privacy.The study contributes to information privacy and information systems literature by raising understanding of the impacts of secondary use, in particular its effects on individual privacy management. In addition, this thesis suggests that information privacy is affected differently by direct and indirect uses. Its contribution to information privacy research is to complement previous methodological approaches by suggesting that if users are made aware of indirect inferences that can be made from their content, negative affective responses decrease while cognitive reactions increase through the processing of information related to their disclosure genres. The reason is that indirect use of information inhibits the negotiation of information privacy boundaries and creating unresolved tensions within those boundaries. Cognitive awareness of inferences made to individual information significantly affects the privacy decision-making process. The implication is that there is a need for more dynamic privacy awareness mechanisms that can empower users by providing them with increased awareness of the indirect information they are sharing.
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| 9. |
- Rizk, Aya, 1988-
(author)
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Data-driven Innovation : An exploration of outcomes and processes within federated networks
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The emergence and pervasiveness of digital technologies are changing many aspects of our lives, including what and how we innovate. Industries and societies are competing to embrace this wave of digitalization by developing the right infrastructures and ecosystems for innovation. Similarly, innovation managers and entrepreneurs are using digital technologies to develop novel products, services, processes, business models, etc. One of the major consequences of digitalization is the massive amounts of machine-readable data generated through digital interactions. But this is not only a consequence, it is also a driver for other innovations to emerge. Employing analytical techniques on data to extract useful patterns and insights enables different aspects of innovation. During the last decade, scholars within digital innovation have started to explore this relationship between analytics and innovation, a phenomenon referred to as data-driven innovation (DDI). Most theories to date view analytics as variable that affects innovation in performative terms and treats it as a black-box. However, if the innovation managers and entrepreneurs are to manage and navigate DDI, and for the investors, funders and policymakers to take informed decisions, they need a better understanding of how DDI outcomes (i.e. market offerings such as products and services) are shaped and how they emerge from a process perspective.This dissertation explores this research gap by addressing two research questions: “What characterizes data-driven innovation outcomes?” and “How do data-driven innovations emerge in federated networks?” A federated network is a type of – increasingly common – contemporary innovation structure that is also enabled by digital technology. The dissertation is based on a compilation of five articles addressing these questions. The overall research approach follows a multiple case study design and the empirical investigation takes place in two case sites corresponding to two EU-funded projects.As a result, a classification taxonomy is developed for data-driven digital services. This taxonomy contributes to the conceptualization of DDI outcomes grounded on static and dynamic characteristics. In addition, a DDI process framework is proposed that highlights the importance of exploration, the temporal relationship between data acquisition and innovation development, and the various factors that influence the process along with examples of their contextual manifestations. Finally, social and cognitive interactions within federated networks of DDI are explored to reveal that the innovation teams rely on data-driven representations to facilitate various stakeholders’ engagement and contribution throughout the process. These representations eventually stabilize into boundary objects that retain the factual integrity of the data and analytical models but are also flexible for contextual interpretation and use. These findings contribute to the current discourse within digital innovation by introducing the lens of data analytics to conceptualize a specific type of digital artifacts, and well as providing a rich descriptive account of an extended digital innovation process. They also contribute to the discourse on data-driven innovation by providing an empirical account of DDI from a process viewpoint.
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| 10. |
- Ståhlbröst, Anna
(author)
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Forming future IT : the living lab way of user involvement
- 2008
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis addresses the process of user involvement in the development of information technology (IT) systems. The motive for this research is that there is still a need of more knowledge about how users can be involved in IT-development when the aim is to develop solutions that represent user needs. This is especially true when the IT-system is developed to attract users as private persons. One attempt to facilitate inclusion of private persons in IT development processes is a phenomenon called Living Lab. Living Labs is a human-centric research and development approach in which IT-systems are co-created, tested, and evaluated in the users' own private context. The Living Lab phenomena can be viewed in two ways, as an environment, and, as an approach and in this thesis, the perspective taken is Living Lab as an approach. Since the Living Lab phenomena is a rather new area there is a noticeable lack of theories and methods supporting its actions. Hence, the purpose of my research is to contribute to a successful use of Living Labs as a means for user involvement by answering the question: How can a Living Lab approach for user involvement that focus on user needs, be designed? To gain insights into the topic I have been involved in three development projects in which the aim was to develop IT solutions based on users' needs. The research method applied in this research is action research based on an interpretive stance; I have used different methods for data- collection, such as focus-group interviews, surveys, and work-shops. In short, the main lessons learned from this research relates to three overarching themes; User involvement, Grappling with user needs, and Living Labs. The first theme concern issues such as user characteristics, user roles, when and how users should be involved. The second theme is divided into two clusters, collecting user data, and generating and understanding user needs. Lessons related to collecting users data concern topics such as encouraging users, storytelling, understanding the social context and the users' situation. The lessons regarding generating and understanding user needs relates to users motivation, the importance of understanding different perspectives and different levels of user needs. The third theme relates to the key-principles of Living Lab approaches, and how these principles are handled, supported, and related to each other in user involvement processes that embrace a Living Lab approach. Based on the lessons learned about the three themes, a methodology called FormIT is formed. The aim of FormIT is to assist Living Lab activities in Living Lab environments, and the methodology is built on ten guidelines. These guidelines are Identify, Inform, Interact, Iterate, Involve, Influence, Inspire, Illuminate, Integrate, and Implement, and they support the design of a Living Lab way of user involvement processes and contribute to fulfil the key-principles of Living Labs. To conclude, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how data about user needs can be collected, generated, and understood through a Living Lab way of user involvement processes. This in turn, contributes to the development of future IT-systems based on user needs, which increases the probability for system acceptance among private persons.
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