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.

The emergence of big data has stimulated enormous investments into business analytics solutions, but large-scale and reliable empirical evidence about the business value of big data and analytics (BDA) remains scarce. This paper presents the results of an econometric study that analyzes the direction, sign, and magnitude of the relationship between BDA and firm performance based on objective measurements of BDA assets. Using a unique panel data set that contains detailed information about BDA solutions owned by 814 companies during the timeframe from 2008 to 2014, on the one hand, and their financial performance, on the other hand, we estimate the relationship between BDA assets and firm productivity and find that live BDA assets are associated with an average of 3 to 7 percent improvement in firm productivity. Yet, we also find substantial differences in returns from BDA when we consider the industry in which a firm operates: While firms in IT-intensive or highly competitive industries are clearly able to extract value from BDA assets, we did not detect measurable productivity improvement for firms outside these industry groups. Taken together, our findings provide robust empirical evidence for the business value of BDA, but also highlight important boundary conditions.

No abstract

Research has emphasized the limitations of qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying organizational phenomena. For example, in-depth interviews are resource-intensive, while questionnaires with closed-ended questions can only measure predefined constructs. With the recent availability of large textual data sets and increased computational power, text mining has become an attractive method that has the potential to mitigate some of these limitations. Thus, we suggest applying topic modeling, a specific text mining technique, as a new and complementary strategy of inquiry to study organizational phenomena. In particular, we outline the potentials of structural topic modeling for organizational research and provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to apply it. Our application example builds on 428,492 reviews of Fortune 500 companies from the online platform Glassdoor, on which employees can evaluate organizations. We demonstrate how structural topic models allow to inductively identify topics that matter to employees and quantify their relationship with employees’ perception of organizational culture. We discuss the advantages and limitations of topic modeling as a research method and outline how future research can apply the technique to study organizational phenomena.

No abstract

This essay discusses the use of big data analytics (BDA) as a strategy of enquiry for advancing information systems (IS) research. In broad terms, we understand BDA as the statistical modelling of large, diverse, and dynamic data sets of usergenerated content and digital traces. BDA, as a new paradigm for utilising big data sources and advanced analytics, has already found its way into some social science disciplines. Sociology and economics are two examples that have successfully harnessed BDA for scientific enquiry. Often, BDA draws on methodologies and tools that are unfamiliar for some IS researchers (e.g., predictive modelling, natural language processing). Following the phases of a typical research process, this article is set out to dissect BDA's challenges and promises for IS research, and illustrates them by means of an exemplary study about predicting the helpfulness of 1.3 million online customer reviews. In order to assist IS researchers in planning, executing, and interpreting their own studies, and evaluating the studies of others, we propose an initial set of guidelines for conducting rigorous BDA studies in IS.

No abstract

No abstract