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Alexander Eck
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Eck
First name
Alexander
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+41 71 224 2799
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1 - 10 of 13
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PublicationWenn der Kunde den Ton angibt : Praktiken für das globale Engineering kundenindividueller Produkte(Imc, Information multimedia communication, 2015-06-01)
;Willner, OlgaSchoensleben, PaulType: journal articleJournal: IM + io : das Magazin für Innovation, Organisation und ManagementVolume: 30Issue: 2 -
PublicationNot all information systems are created equal: exploring IT resources for agile systems delivery(Ibi Research GmbH, 2014-11-01)
;Keidel, Stefan ;Schneider, ThomasType: journal articleJournal: BIT Banking and Information TechnologyVolume: 15Issue: 3 -
PublicationType: journal articleJournal: Industrie ManagementIssue: 4
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PublicationCoordination Across Open Source Software Communities: Findings from the Rails EcosystemWhile coordination of work within open source software (OSS) communities is well-researched, it is virtually unknown how work is coordinated across community boundaries. However, as OSS projects are often part of a larger digital ecosystem of interdependent artifacts and communities, cross-community coordination is a pertinent topic. We turn to the ecosystem around Ruby on Rails to empirically explore this research gap. To this end, we scrutinize 96 coordination episodes among five interrelated OSS projects and identify four cross-community coordination mechanisms: adaptation, upgrading, positioning, and departure. Each mechanism describes a distinct and stable arrangement to integrate contributions across community borders. After presenting our findings, we reason about the significance of the results on explaining generative change in digital ecosystems.Type: conference paperVolume: 1
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PublicationReconstructing Open Source Software Ecosystems: Finding Structure in Digital TracesWe report on the computational reconstruction of 273 open source software ecosystems, consisting of 41,388 artifacts and couplings between them, extracted from digital traces of 34.4 million software artifacts. We argue that digital traces are a new kind of data source, and propose ‘exploratory data loops’ to exploit the benefits of digital trace data in early stages of a research program. We apply this schema to systematically assess data quality, inform sample selection, and detect patterns. Empirically, we show that highly distributed networks are unlikely to follow a hierarchically modular structure, despite popular belief. As is shown visually with two examples, very distinct structures can emerge from autonomous behavior. The results indicate that different, yet similarly effective, strategies may exist to organize for distributed innovation in digital ecosystems. The paper is concluded by outlining how follow-up work will harness the reconstructed ecosystems for detecting behavioral patterns in distributed networks.Type: conference paper
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PublicationUntangling Generativity: Two Perspectives on Unanticipated Change Produced by Diverse ActorsDigital platform ecosystems capitalize on the engagement of large groups of actors with diverse skills that create unexpected services, find novel uses, and move the ecosystem forward in unanticipated ways. The generativity concept captures this phenomenon, which some scholars regard as fundamental to our understanding of how digital innovation plays out. Despite such claims, it is unclear what generativity means and how it manifests itself. After scrutinizing the foundational definition, we delineate two perspectives on generativity. The ‘generative properties’ perspective asks which properties of digital artifacts embedded in social structure invite actors to set free their creativity and produce unanticipated outcomes. In contrast, the ‘generative patterns’ perspective asks which patterns of events lead to an evolutionary dynamic that produces unanticipated change. We find cues for both perspectives in literature, which tentatively validates them. We then formulate a socio-technical model of digital platform ecosystems and describe ecosystem generativity by applying both perspectives. In this context, the first perspective highlights the digital platform and its controlling orchestrator, while the second perspective directs our attention to interactions among actors and artifacts. We conclude this paper by discussing how generativity can help explain digital innovation.Type: conference paperJournal: Information systems as a global gateway : 24th European Conference on Information Systems
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PublicationExploring how Digitized Products enable Industrial Service Innovation - An Affordance PerspectiveThis paper explores the impact of digitized products on industrial service innovation. Digital technolo-gies equip physical products with versatile material properties that create a multitude of opportunities for value co-creation. In particular, product-complementing service offerings are an obvious field for investigating service innovation that leverage digitized products. We contribute to research on digitally enabled service systems that progressively emerge in industrial settings. Anchored in a revelatory case study in the intra-logistics industry, we explore how digitized products are put to innovative uses. Spe-cifically, we take an affordance perspective to identify goal-oriented action potentials that arise from material properties of the digitized product and organizational use contexts in service systems. Inter-preting case data, we show how original equipment manufacturers create the potential to (1) monitor and control industrial products remotely; (2) empower technical customer service; (3) manage, opti-mize, and integrate product operations; and (4) offer performance-based contracting of industrial prod-ucts. Besides identifying affordances and demonstrating how digitized products enable novel configu-rations in service systems, we contribute to theory by (1) proposing a framework to conceptualize af-fordances of digitized products for service innovation and (2) linking the service-dominant logic with affordance theory.Type: conference paper
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PublicationA Socio-Technical Approach to Study Consumer-Centric Information SystemsGiven the unprecedented role of digital service platforms in private life, this research sets out to identify the mechanisms that are designed into information systems with the purpose to increase consumer centricity. We evaluate the consumer centricity of an information system against three reflective indicators, that is the degree of need orientation, value co-creation and relationship orientation and conceptualize consumer centricity as the ability to align social and technical information system components. We employ a positivist, explanatory case study approach to test three hypotheses on system component alignment in cases from three domains (gaming, social networking, and video sharing). We found preliminary evidence for three alignment mechanisms that increase consumer centricity. With this research, we plan to contribute to the literature on consumer-centric information systems by elaborating and empirically grounding a socio-technical approach to study mechanisms and their joint application to increase consumer centricity in information systems.Type: conference paper
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PublicationThe Generative Capacity of Digital Artifacts: A Mapping of the Field(Association for Information Systems, 2015-09-07)The concept of generativity as the capacity of a technology or a system to be malleable by diverse groups of actors in unanticipated ways has recently gained considerable traction in information systems research. We review a sample of the body of knowledge and identify that scholars commonly investigated generativity in conjunction with digital infrastructures and digital platforms, both of which are complex, networked, and evolving socio-technical systems. Interestingly, other types of digital artifacts have been neglected, despite our initial assumption that the distinct attributes (e.g., reprogrammability, distributedness) of any digital artifact match well with generativity. The literature review also reveals that innovation brought about heterogeneous groups of actors is universally regarded as the goal of generativity, discounting the possibility of exploiting generative systems towards other valuable ends such as organizational agility. Furthermore, scholars commonly discuss generativity in conjunction with the logic of modularity, leading to unresolved questions on how these two concepts might complement each other. Another important contribution of this paper is the systematization of various meanings of generativity, spanning from the philosophical - e.g., generative mechanisms in critical realist research - to a more literal understanding, for instance generativity as synonym to ‘creation of a particular solution'.Type: conference paper
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PublicationFit for Continuous Integration: How Organizations Assimilate an Agile Practice(Association for Information Science, 2014-08-07)Type: conference paper