The "standing on the shoulders of giants" metaphor is often used to acknowledge the work of others when undertaking research and, in particular, stresses the importance of literature reviews in scientific inquiry. Though the significance of literature reviews has never been in doubt, researchers, especially novice researchers, still struggle with developing effective strategies for reviewing literature. An important reason for this difficulty is the rapidly increasing number of potentially relevant publications-not all of which necessarily add value to a literature review. As such, avoiding standing on the shoulders of dwarfs literature search emerges as a major issue in crafting an effective literature review. In this paper, we discuss challenges of literature searches in the increasingly dynamic context of information systems (IS) research and make recommendations for how to deal with them. We present practical guidelines and a checklist to help researchers with planning and organizing their literature searches.

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Blockchain technology offers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first reflect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond. We conclude our discourse with a summary of seven research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology in the context of BPM.

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Recent years have seen the emergence of physical products that are digitally networked with other products and with information systems to enable complex business scenarios in manufacturing, mobility, or healthcare. These "smart products", which enable the co-creation of "smart service" that is based on monitoring, optimization, remote control, and autonomous adaptation of products, profoundly transform service systems into what we call "smart service systems". In a multi-method study that includes conceptual research and qualitative data from in-depth interviews, we conceptualize "smart service" and "smart service systems" based on using smart products as boundary objects that integrate service consumers' and service providers' resources and activities. Smart products allow both actors to retrieve and to analyze aggregated field evidence and to adapt service systems based on contextual data. We discuss the implications that the introduction of smart service systems have for foundational concepts of service science and conclude that smart service systems are characterized by technology-mediated, continuous, and routinized interactions.