Design in an ecosystem context

To arrive at a more holistic understanding of how the design of role-oriented ES evolves across the different actors in an ES ecosystem, we may attempt to integrate the findings from the study with the increased understanding of ES ecosystems from the pre-studies. Once again we may draw on the BWW theory (see section 2.7.1) for the purpose of gaining an understanding of how the design of predefined system roles in role-oriented ES evolves in the deep and surface structures across the ES ecosystem, as illustrated in Table 9.

Table 9. Design of deep and surface structures of system roles in an ecosystem context.

From the research findings it is clear that the ES vendors control whether an ES qualifies as role-oriented in the first place. The vendors design the representation of roles (and other concepts) in deep structures of role-oriented ESs and lay the foundation for how roles are reflected in the surface structures through the user interface. During the realization of the role-oriented ES, the vendors decide how internal and external structures of the role are modeled and embedded in the deep structures in the role-oriented ES. The vendors also decide the scope of the predefined roles, including which countries and partially also which industries the predefined roles are aimed at.

When the ISVs “receive” the core version of the role-oriented ES, the deep and surface structures of the roles are in already place (see section 3.2.1). The ISVs thus have a

significantly lower control of the deep and surface structure than the vendors. Still, the ISVs may develop industry specific variations of the system roles to augment the roles to fit specific customer segments and even add functionality to support roles in organizational functions (departments) not covered by the core version of the system.

Some degree of vendor control over the system roles is thus lost, although the vendors exercise a certain influence and control over their partners (paper I) (Huber et al.

2010).

When the VARs implement the role-oriented ESs in client organizations, the system roles are mapped to the actual roles of the client organization and may be configured and tailored to meet the specific requirements of the individual organization (see section 3.3.2). The VARs have little control over the representation of roles in the deep structures of the role-oriented and primarily influence the representation of roles in surface structures through configuration and tailoring (see sections 3.3.4 and 3.3.5.).

The focus of the system roles configured by the VARs is thus the individual client organizations, although the VARs may reuse tailored roles across different organizations (see section 3.3.4) and specific departments. The focus of fit in the client organizations is on the role set in their particular organization. The system roles may be specialized and assigned to users based on functional departments (as in Company 2) or enlarged to fit a broader set of tasks (as in Company 3,4, and 5).

4.1.1 Personalization – beyond fit at the role level

The research presented in this dissertation has so far been focused on the concept of role-oriented ESs. However, the findings from the research also provide the opportunity for peeking into fit of ESs beyond the role level. Representatives from vendors, partner companies, and client organizations argued that role-oriented ESs is just the first step towards personalized interaction with ESs. The options for users to configure the user interface to their personal preferences in the two case systems (see paper III and IV) was thus perceived as an important step towards personalized user

interaction. This type of personalization differs from much of the conventional literature on personalization of ISs (e.g. Mobasher, Cooley and Srivastava 2000;

Mulvenna, Anand and Büchner 2000; Zimmermann, Specht and Lorenz 2005), in that personalization is often perceived as achieved through ‘recommender systems’ based on user models and stored data about the behavior of users (typically in the process of buying products online). The personalization options offered in the two role-oriented ESs is a more user-driven type of personalization, offering a set of “manual”

personalization functions.

Some partner companies had engaged in extensive training of the users to enable them to personalize the user interfaces, and some users in all of the case companies had utilized the option of personalizing their user interface and perceived the option as beneficial for fitting the system to their personal preferences (see paper V). These findings indicate that the option for personalization could be viewed as complementary to role-oriented fit, supporting previous suggestions of personalization as a way to accommodate the individual preferences to achieve fit at the individual level (e.g.

Greenberg 1991). Although the users have no control over the deep structures in the design and fit of the system, they may thus still influence the surface structures of the system to achieve fit at the individual level, as illustrated in Table 9.

The proposition that design of the ES artifacts can be viewed as an evolution throughout an ecosystem is arguably already implicit or emergent in much of the literature on ES life-cycles (see section 1.4). However, the integration with theory of deep and surface structures and the amendment of design at the individual level advances our understanding of how the design of ESs as a tailorable technology (Germonprez et al. 2007) is modified across the different actors in the ES ecosystem throughout its life-cycle. The illustration of design as evolutional in the ecosystem thus helps us to identify the level of actor at which a specific type of misfit may be addressed. Viewing the design of ESs in this perspective, there is thus little point in,

for example, attempting to remedy deficiency misfits caused by the deep structures at the level of the individual user, as this level of ecosystem actors have no influence of these structures, whereas misfits attributable to the surface structures of the systems may still, to some degree, be addressed at this level.