An increasing number of companies are introducing artificial agents as self-service tools on their websites, often motivated by the need to provide cost-efficient interaction solutions. These agents are designed to help customers and clients to conduct their business on the website. Their role on commercial websites is often to act as online sales/shopping assistants with the hope of replacing some of the interactions between customers and sales staff, thus supplementing or replacing human-to-human communication. However, research on artificial agents and comparisons with human-to-human communication, in particular, is still scarce. The purpose of this article is to explore the similarities and differences in communication between an artificial agent and customers compared with face-to-face communication between human service providers and customers. The method employed is a qualitative comparison of face-to-face human service provision in a travel agency setting and logs of interactions between customers and an artificial agent on an airline company website. The analysis is based on the theory of “activity-based communication analysis” and makes use of a framework of specific communication features provided by this theory. The article demonstrates a number of deficiencies in communication between artificial embodied agents and humans, suggesting that artificial embodied agents still lack many of the desirable communicative aspects of human-to-human service encounters.

Information systems as an artefact-oriented discipline require a strong interaction between researchers, developers and users regarding design of, development of, and the study of the use of digital artefacts in social settings. During recent years, performing research in a design science research spirit has gained increasing interest. In larger scale design research endeavours, access to systems development capabilities becomes necessary. Such a unit, InnovationLab, was established in 2006 in a university setting in Sweden. In this paper we are investigating the 5 years’ experience of running this InnovationLab. Our findings point to an innovation lab being valuable for research in general and especially for design science research. However, in order to balance the business of an innovation lab, it will be necessary to provide services for other stakeholders (such as administrative units, teachers, and students) as a means for developing systems development capability aimed at supporting researchers.

A service encounter is conceived as an interactive process between a service provider and a service receiver. It has however largely been analyzed as a non-interactive phenomenon which leads to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the dynamics of service encounters as an interactive process. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether a pragmatic approach could form a foundation for the conception of service encounters as an interactive phenomenon. The results show that in order to capture the essence of interaction in service encounters from a pragmatic view, researchers should turn to the concept of action. In order to avoid a one-side view (the customer or the company/company representative) of the service encounter, the inter-related actions need to be taken into consideration.

Within the field of information systems an interest in environmental issues has driven the agenda for research from green IT improvement to sustainable innovation. A challenge yet to investigate is how sustainable innovation involving a cluster of actors from multiple settings should be 1) designed and 2) orchestrated so that the innovation performed enables sustainable change. Processes for launching sustainable innovation should consequently be analysed in order to further investigate this notion. In northern Europe there is today a strong drive towards enabling initiatives utilizing mobile information technology improving the everyday transportation of people. This paper analysis the launch of a research and innovation cluster with the aim to develop information infrastructures and processes that stimulate distributed development of digital services for everyday travel. Events performed during the two-year start-up have been analysed identifying essential actions for network design and innovation orchestration, creating hypotheses, which enables further research about the establishment of sustainable innovation.

Value creation of today is often a co-production in multi-organizational settings. This requires knowledge about how to conceive multi-organizational actor roles as foundations for co-ordinating and efficiently co-produce customer value. Some contemporary business process modelling approaches builds upon modelling interaction between two business parties (i.e. dyadic interaction), but do not acknowledge interaction patterns involving several network actors in their different actor roles. In this paper value creation in multi-organizational businesses are seen as value chains in value networks. The notion of assignments is the underlying structure in a multi-organizational perspective on business processes and is used to create foundations for distinguishing interaction patterns. Modelling and improving multi-organizational business processes conceived as action and interaction arranged in assignment structures, imply that dyadic role models need to be challenged as generative instruments. In this paper four generic multi-organizational network actor roles are brought forward (end- customer, main actor, co-ordinating actor, and co-producing actor) given meaning in and further instantiated in generic assignment actor roles based on their involvement in different multi-organizational interaction patterns. Thus, patterns of interaction constituting multi-organizational business processes are distinguished creating the necessary conditions for diverse network actors by the identification of their role in the action logic.

This paper addresses collaborative research as an action research approach. Many times action research is described as embracing one research organisation and one business organisation. We are challenging this view by introducing the concept of collaborative practice. A collaborative practice can be seen as a cluster of local practices and researchers working together. In this way, a collaborative practice should enable joint learning between, and joint development efforts for, several business practices as well as contributing to general practice and the scientific body of knowledge. Based on a case study within efficient IT Service Management (ITSM), the concept of collaborative practice and its relation to other adjacent concepts (such as local practice, general practice and scientific body of knowledge) have been characterized. Our results should be viewed as preliminary since they are gathered from an ongoing project.

Design Science Research (DSR) is concerned with demonstrating design principles. In order to prove the utility of these principles, design ideas are materialized into artifacts and put into an environment sufficient to host the testing of these principles. When DSR is used in combination with action research, constraints in the environment may restrain researchers to fully inscribe or test such principles. In this paper it is argued that scholars pursuing DSR has paid insufficient attention to the type of change necessary in the local practice. We draw upon theories on IS change as punctuated equilibrium to illustrate when DSR demonstrators can be used to make substantial contributions to local practice as well as to the scientific body of knowledge.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are some of the prominent large-scale digital service providers that are having tremendous impact on societies, corporations and individuals. However, despite the rapid uptake and their obvious influence on the behavior of individuals and the business models and networks of organizations, we still lack a deeper, theory-guided understanding of the related phenomenon. We use Teece’s notion of complementary assets and extend it towards ‘digital complementary assets’ (DCA) in an attempt to provide such a theory-guided understanding of these digital services. Building on Teece’s theory, we make three contributions. First, we offer a new conceptualization of digital complementary assets in the form of digital public goods and digital public assets. Second, we differentiate three models for how organizations can engage with such digital complementary assets. Third, user-base is found to be a critical factor when considering appropriability.

Business transactions of today often rely on the involvement of several organizations in its preparation and realization. This means that value creation is distributed among several actors and needs to be coordinated. The division of multi-organizational businesses into business processes need to reflect the co-production of value arranged in distributed value production structures. There relies however an unresolved quest of which criteria that should govern such division of business processes. In this paper, business processes for conceiving multi- organizational businesses are identified founded in how customer assignments embed and integrate other assignments through value chains in value networks. Five core process types are identified founded in this assignment structure; development processes, planning processes, provision processes, order fulfilment processes, and evaluation processes. These processes are of both condition creating and realization characteristics to enable an efficient co-ordination of the multi-organizational business.