On Jan. 28, 2021, Christian Kaiser, external doctoral student at the Chair of Information Systems, esp. Business Information Systems, successfully defended his doctoral thesis. The topic of the thesis was "Quantified Vehicles: Data, Services, Ecosystems". The reviewers were Prof. Michael Fellmann, Prof. Kurt Sandkuhl and Prof. Simon Trang (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), who jointly supervised the thesis. The result of the defense was the recommendation to the university to award the doctoral degree "Dr.-Ing.", as the thesis was judged to be very good. Below you will find the abstract of the thesis.
Abstract:
Advancing digitalization has highlighted the potential of so-called Quantified Vehicles for gathering valuable (vehicle) sensor data about the vehicle itself and its environment. Consequently, (vehicle) Data has become an important resource of the automotive industry, which can pave the way to (Data-driven) Services. There are multiple roles to occupy in service generation, from data provider via service developer and service provider to end user. The (Data-driven Service) Ecosystem of actors that collaborate to ultimately generate services, has thus only shaped up in recent years.
This dissertation was started in 2016 when literature and research in this field were still scarce. In retrospect, the rise of automotive Data-driven Services was accompanied. Vehicle Data, Data-driven Services, and the corresponding Data-driven Service Ecosystems have become an important market in recent years, as reports of analysts (e.g. Capgemini, Deloitte, KPMG, McKinsey, and PWC) show. The expectations even extend to statements about radical changes in automotive business models due to data-driven service possibilities. And such potentially radical changes of an economic driving force of Germany, where 830,000 employees generated around 435 billion Euros in 2019, are undoubtly a relevant research topic. And so it is a variety of influences that characterize the service development or have so far prevented Data-driven Services from breaking through that could be investigated. However, the five objectives of this work are to (i) better understand how vehicle data becomes a relevant artifact for business and innovation, (ii) define and describe Quantified Vehicles as a form of digitalization in the automotive domain, (iii) develop concepts and Data-driven Services prototypically, that represent added value for consumers to enhance the understanding of challenges in service development, (iv) better understand the process and actors of value generation, and the interplay of the actors with each other in the ecosystem, by conducting empirical research involving automotive domain experts, and (v) conduct design activities backed by empirical research to conceptually model data-driven value generation and Data-driven Service Ecosystem building.
To address the objectives, three research questions were defined, which were worked through in the research process with the help of eight subtopics. Within the framework of the cumulative dissertation, the author of this thesis contributed to a total of 14 publications (ten Abstract III as corresponding / main author) that can be assigned to these eight subtopics and that con[1]tribute to answer the three research questions: Two publications for the subtopic Definition and Introduction of “Quantified Vehicles”, two publications for the subtopic Analysis of the Market: Services, Start-ups, OEMs, Business Models, and Trends, one publication for the subtopic Definition of a Research Agenda for the Information Systems Community, two publications for the subtopic Analysis and Definition of the VDVC (Vehicle Data Value Chain), three publications for subtopic Concepts along the VDVC, two publications for subtopic Prototypical Implementations along the VDVC, and one publication each for the subtopics Analysis of Data-driven Service Ecosystems and Conceptual Model for Value Creation in Data-driven Services. The 14 publications consist of three journal publications (E&I1 , BISE, and IJIM), two book-series contributions (LNMOB, and LNBIP), eight conference contributions (NBM, i-Know, ECIS, ICVES, WEBIST, CAiSE, AMCIS, and VEHITS), and a contribution in a BITKOM position paper (BITKOM). Thereby, the journal publications IJIM (Impact Factor 8.21), BISE (Impact Factor 5.83), the ECIS conference publication (VHB-JQ3: B) are particularly outstanding.