title: Unblackboxing Digital Services - Spotlight on Data and Interaction
Creators: name: Rau, Daniel
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Dissertation
subject: Digitalisierung
subject: Digitale Services
subject: Datenschutz
subject: Proaktivität
subject: Onlinehandel
subject: Finanzdienstleistungen
subject: Digitalization
subject: Digital Services
subject: Privacy
subject: Proactivity
subject: Retail commerce
subject: Financial Services
subject: IoT-commerce
subject: Fintech
subject: 330

description: Digitalization enables new business models, innovative products, and digital services. Despite its rapid progress in practice, there are only few theoretical insights into digital services. This cumulative doctoral thesis analyzes digital services in selected industries and considers their specifics regarding data and interaction. An in-depth examination of taxonomy design as a method to analyze emerging phenomena such as digital services complements this thesis. First, this doctoral thesis analyzes privacy and proactivity as two cross-industry phenomena in the context of digital services. Despite the prevailing opinion of data privacy as a necessary evil, the research article #1 takes an upside perspective on data privacy. Based on the well-established Kano model, the article empirically shows that the implementation of certain data privacy measures has the potential to delight consumers. The privacy-aware analysis of consumers’ personal and contextual data can help organizations to anticipate consumer needs. On this basis, digital services facilitate proactive interaction between the organization and consumers or on behalf of consumers. The research article #2 analyzes such proactive digital services through the empirical and conceptual design of a taxonomy; the article also applies the taxonomy on exemplary proactive services and evaluates it through expert interviews. Second, this thesis investigates the application of digital services in two selected industries. The Internet of Things (IoT) has facilitated connectivity between devices with sensors and actuators (e.g., speakers and washing machines) and the Internet. In retail commerce, this connectivity has led to novel ways of how products and services can be ordered online. The research article #3 refers to this phenomenon of “IoT-commerce”. Building on the methodological foundation of the activity and affordance theories and supported by literature review and empirical validation, this article proposes opportunities of IoT-commerce for consumers (i.e., affordances) and its manifestations along the consumer buying process. This thesis also sheds light on digital services offered by fintech start-ups (integration of financial services and information technology). Using digital technologies, fintech start-ups spearhead digital innovation in the financial services industry and offer enhanced and new value propositions for consumers (e.g., crowdlending and cryptocurrencies). In particular, the research article #4 analyzes the service offerings of fintech start-ups from a non-functional perspective. For this purpose, the article proposes a conceptual and empirical taxonomy that is applied to a sample of 227 real-world fintech start-ups and used to derive archetypes with statistical cluster analysis. Novel phenomena such as digital services demand for in-depth analysis. Taxonomies help in understanding such emerging phenomena. Thus, research article #5 concludes this doctoral thesis with a methodological contribution on taxonomy design. It proposes an extended taxonomy design process and provides 26 operational recommendations for taxonomy designers.