Building the ‘Digital’ Library: Routes to Managing our Institutional Digital Learning, Teaching and Research Assets Together

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Creating and measuring customer value in digital businesses

Most economic transactions nowadays are due to the effective exchange of information in which digital resources play a huge role. New actors are coming into existence all the time, so organizations are facing difficulties in keeping their current customers and attracting new customer segments and markets. Companies are trying to find the key to their success and creating superior customer value seems to be one solution. Digital technologies can be used to deliver value to customers in ways that extend customers’ normal conscious experiences in the context of time and space. By creating customer value, companies can gain the increased loyalty of existing customers and better ways to serve new customers effectively. Based on these assumptions, the objective of this study was to design a framework to enable organizations to create customer value in digital business. The research was carried out as a literature review and an empirical study, which consisted of a web-based survey and semi-structured interviews. The data from the empirical study was analyzed as mixed research with qualitative and quantitative methods. These methods were used since the object of the study was to gain deeper understanding about an existing phenomena. Therefore, the study used statistical procedures and value creation is described as a phenomenon. The framework was designed first based on the literature and updated based on the findings from the empirical study. As a result, relationship, understanding the customer, focusing on the core product or service, the product or service quality, incremental innovations, service range, corporate identity, and networks were chosen as the top elements of customer value creation. Measures for these elements were identified. With the measures, companies can manage the elements in value creation when dealing with present and future customers and also manage the operations of the company. In conclusion, creating customer value requires understanding the customer and a lot of information sharing, which can be eased by digital resources. Understanding the customer helps to produce products and services that fulfill customers’ needs and desires. This could result in increased sales and make it easier to establish efficient processes.

A DNS Bases Approach To Electronic Persistance, or "If Your Pants Fit, Why Use Suspenders?"

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Targeted Annotation of Scientific Literature and Data Resources in Invenio Digital Libraries

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Costs and Benefits of a Shared Digital Long-Term Preservation System

Paper presented at the 40th Annual Conference of LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche - Association of European Research Libraries) on July 1st, 2011; with the slides used at the presentation.

Future revenue models: Transformation from textbooks to digital solutions in the educational publishing industry, Case Sanoma Learning

This study was conducted in order to learn how companies’ revenue models will be transformed due to the digitalisation of its products and processes. Because there is still only a limited number of researches focusing solely on revenue models, and particularly on the revenue model change caused by the changes at the business environment, the topic was initially approached through the business model concept, which organises the different value creating operations and resources at a company in order to create profitable revenue streams. This was used as the base for constructing the theoretical framework for this study, used to collect and analyse the information. The empirical section is based on a qualitative study approach and multiple-case analysis of companies operating in learning materials publishing industry. Their operations are compared with companies operating in other industries, which have undergone comparable transformation, in order to recognise either similarities or contrasts between the cases. The sources of evidence are a literature review to find the essential dimensions researched earlier, and interviews 29 of managers and executives at 17 organisations representing six industries. Based onto the earlier literature and the empirical findings of this study, the change of the revenue model is linked with the change of the other dimen-sions of the business model. When one dimension will be altered, as well the other should be adjusted accordingly. At the case companies the transformation is observed as the utilisation of several revenue models simultaneously and the revenue creation processes becoming more complex.

Costs and Benefits of a Shared Digital Long-Term Preservation System

This paper describes the cost-benefit analysis of digital long-term preservation (LTP) that was carried out in the context of the Finnish National Digital Library Project (NDL) in 2010. The analysis was based on the assumption that as many as 200 archives, libraries, and museums will share an LTP system. The term ‘system’ shall be understood as encompassing not only information technology, but also human resources, organizational structures, policies and funding mechanisms. The cost analysis shows that an LTP system will incur, over the first 12 years, cumulative costs of €42 million, i.e. an average of €3.5 million per annum. Human resources and investments in information technology are the major cost factors. After the initial stages, the analysis predicts annual costs of circa €4 million. The analysis compared scenarios with and without a shared LTP system. The results indicate that a shared system will have remarkable benefits. At the development and implementation stages, a shared system shows an advantage of €30 million against the alternative scenario consisting of five independent LTP solutions. During the later stages, the advantage is estimated at €10 million per annum. The cumulative cost benefit over the first 12 years would amount to circa €100 million.

DIGITAL BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS IN EMERGING MARKETS – Developing Business Marketing in Russia

The core idea of this Master's Thesis was that five key characteristics – market heterogeneity, sociopolitical governance, chronic shortage of resources, unbranded competition, and inadequate infrastructure – of emerging markets are radically different from the traditional industrialized capitalist society and they will require us to rethink the core assumptions of business-to-business marketing, such as business relationships, marketing communication elements, and digitalization. In this research, Russia is considered to be an emerging market that reflects the aforementioned theoretical characteristics. The research was a qualitative case study and furthermore a collective case study. In the beginning three digital marketing professionals were interviewed to better understand digital B2B marketing. The actual research data was collected through seven structured theme interviews with representatives of the case companies operating in Russia. The selection of case companies included three business consulting companies and four industrial companies. The aim of this qualitative study was to understand and clarify how business marketing exploits digital marketing methods as a part of the chosen business marketing strategy under emerging markets’ special conditions. This objective was divided in three research questions: 1) How the chosen marketing strategy reflects in the business marketing process? 2) How digital marketing communication contributes to business marketing? 3) How are the emerging markets’ characteristics reflected in the business marketing process? The main research findings indicate that digital business-to-business marketing communications can be useful and effective. Moreover, business DMC can be defined and structured in a reasonable way. The company's prevalent marketing paradigm and the chosen marketing strategy reflect in the business marketing process, and in utilizing digital marketing communications. The assumption that emerging markets set an environment with special characteristics for business marketing was supported by the study. However, the business environmental aspects were not considerably disturbing digital B2B marketing, but making it even more reasonable to harness in Russia.

Spotlight: A Blacklight Plugin for Showcasing Digital Collections

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

DevOps for Digital Repositories

Workshop at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

A service perspective to digital innovation: exploring the emergence of autonomous shipping

Current research describes digital innovation largely similar to product innovation. Digital innovation is seen as an object of coherent activities, however in reality digital innovation results from convergence of variant technologies and those related actors with versatile business goals. To account for the dynamic nature of digital innovation, this study applies a service perspective to digital innovation. The purpose of the study is to understand how digital innovation emerges within a service ecosystem for autonomous shipping. The sub-objectives of this study are to 1) identify what factors motivate and demotivate actors to integrate resources for autonomous shipping, 2) explore the key technology areas to be integrated to realise the autonomous shipping concept, and 3) suggest how the technology areas are combined for mutual value creation within a service eco-system for autonomous shipping. Insights from autonomous driving were also included. This study draws on literatures on service innovation and service-dominant logic. The research was conducted as a qualitative exploratory case study. The data comprise interviews of 18 marine and automotive industry experts, 4 workshops, 4 seminars, and observations as well as various secondary data sources. The findings revealed that the key actors have versatile motivations regarding autonomous shipping. These varied from opportunities for single applications to occupying a central role in an autonomous technology platform. Thus, autonomous shipping can be seen as an umbrella concept comprising multiple levels. In technical terms, the development of the concept of autonomous shipping is largely based on combining existing technology solutions, which are gradually integrated towards more systemic entities comprising areas of the autonomous shipping concept. This study argues that a service perspective embraces the inherently complex and dynamic nature of digital innovation. This is captured in the developed research framework that describes digital innovation emerging on different levels of interaction: 1. strategic relationships for new solutions, 2. new local networks for technology platforms, and 3. global networks for new markets. The framework shows how the business models and motivations of digital innovation actors feed the emergence of digital innovation in overlapping service ecosystems that together comprise an innovation ecosystem for autonomous technologies. Digital innovation managers will benefit from seeing their businesses as part of a larger ecosystem of value co-creating actors. In orchestrating digital innovation within a service ecosystem, it is suggested that managers consider the resources, roles and institutions within the ecosystem. Finally, as autonomous shipping is at its infancy, the topic provides a number of interesting avenues for future research.

Digital Transformation of Municipal Services in Finland

Digitalization has been widely adopted by private organizations of all sizes. As customers we are starting to expect a certain level of digital services from businesses and these expectations are evolving to consider the public sector services as well. Moreover, the Finnish municipalities are under pressure to cut costs and make their operation more efficient. This research aims in exploring the field of municipal digitalization in Finland with three main questions to answer: what are the motivations for municipalities for digital service transformation, what the main benefits of this transformation are and what are the challenges for the transformation. The research starts with examining the characteristics of municipal operation and reviewing some of the relevant digital service opportunities. In the empirical part of the research, 11 professionals related to the municipal field were interviewed using a semi-structured interview design. These interviewees were chosen from three important groups for the change: the service provider, municipal administration and municipal employees. The data gained from the interviews was first summarized according to the main topics chosen from the literature and then reflected on the digital services opportunities presented in the research. The motivations discovered in both the service provider and the city of Porvoo interviews were: tightening resources combined with increasing expectations, transparent structuring of information, supporting the shift into mobile and providing new channels for customers to participate. The benefits discovered in all groups were: efficiency, customer experience, transparent structuring of information, reducing manual input and responding to customer needs in service development. The challenges perceived by multiple groups were: change resistance, innovating new with no best practices and defining the scope and new operation model. The results of this research suggest that even with some challenges along the way, digitalization is a likely future for the Finnish public sector. The business case for the transformation is becoming increasingly evident on both municipal- and governmental levels.