Aleksi Aaltonen

On the importance of powerful simplifications

Business school academics sell ideas on how to manage things better. These often come in the form of what I call a powerful simplification. 5 min read in Medium — June 2, 2024

Information Systems Development and Data Modeling (book review)

Every now and then one comes across an IS book that has succeeded in maintaining its relevance astonishingly well over the years. Information Systems Development and Data Modeling: Conceptual and Philosophical Foundations by Rudy Hirschheim, Heinz K. Klein, and Kalle Lyytinen is one of those books. From the Data Studies Bibliography blog — May 24, 2024

‘Data are’ or ‘data is’?

I have always struggled whether ‘data are’ or ‘data is’, that is, whether data should be treated as a countable plural form or as a mass noun. From the Data Studies Bibliography blog — April 24, 2024

On respect and disagreement in academia

Knowledge grows when we disagree with each other and, in this sense, functioning academia is an institutionalized disagreement. 4 min read in Medium — April 19, 2024

What makes a good hypothesis?

I reflect upon my own misconceptions and lessons learned about the important role of hypotheses in an MIS research paper. 4 min read in Medium — March 13, 2024

Data-driven, data-based or data innovation?

A simple typology for thinking clearly about different types of innovation related to data. 2 min read in Medium — February  12, 2024

All data are wrong, but...

The old adage "all models are wrong, but some are useful" applies just as much to data. 3 min read in Medium — January 18, 2024

NYT vs OpenAI and Microsoft

Systematically harvesting millions of copyrighted documents and using them to build a competing product cannot be fair use, or can it? 5 min read in Medium — January 3, 2024

Journal publication

MIS Quarterly published my article Comparing Platform Owners' Early and Late Entry into Complementary Markets with Runyu Shi, Ola Henfridsson and Ram Gopal. The article is available here. — November 30, 2023

Journal publication

Information Systems Research published my article The Performative Production of Trace Data with Marta Stelmaszak. The article is available here. — September 20, 2023

The duality of data

I made a (futile) attempt to define phenomena studied by information systems dicipline. 3 min read in Medium — August 30, 2023

Journal publication

Communications of the Association for Information Systems published my panel report What is Missing from Research on Data in Information Systems? with Cristina Alaimo, Elena Parmiggiani, Marta Stelmaszak, Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Jannis Kallinikos, and Eric Monteiro. Full text is available here. — August 3, 2023

Book chapter

My chapter Strategizing with Data: Data-based Innovations and Complementaries with Cristina Alaimo was published in Research Handbook on Digital Strategy — May 10, 2023

Social media was consuming me

Twitter and LinkedIn are useful tools for supporting your academic career, but avoid being drawn into the algorithmic games of Facebook. 6 min read in Medium — January 26, 2022

How to count the review rounds?

Confused how to communicate the status of your manuscript submitted to a peer-reviewed journal exactly? Here is how! 2 min read in Medium — January 10, 2022

Gender bias in MIS

Silvia Masiero and I reflect upon gender bias in the academic field of information systems. 4 min read in Medium — December 8, 2021

There is no self-plagiarism

Plagiarism is a gross academic misconduct that should be treated with zero tolerance – yet, there is no such thing as self-plagiarism. 2 min read in Medium — October 4, 2021

Journal publication

Journal of Management Information Systems published my article The Making of Data Commodities: Data Analytics as an Embedded Process with Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos. Full text is available here. — August 6, 2021

Academia as competition

Competition in academia is great – but we must see it differently. 8 min read in Medium — May 24, 2021

I deleted my Academia.edu account

The social platform for academics will happily turn publishing into a rapid-fire game of quick, shallow publications, likes, meaningless citations and other vanity metrics. 3 min read in Medium — April 3, 2021

Solutions that create problems

Technology breeds more technology by creating problems that need technological solutions. 3 min read in Medium — March 13, 2021

A vocabulary of data science concepts

I wrote a simple summary of fundamental data science concepts for undergraduate students at Temple University. 2 min read in Medium — February 5, 2021

Paying for peer reviews is a bad idea

Paying for academic peer reviews is a well-intentioned bad idea. This post explains why. 5 min read in Medium — November 24, 2020

Book chapter

Our chapter with Cristina Alaimo and Jannis Kallinikos on data-based value creation has been published in Handbook of Digital Innovation. — July 31, 2020

Donald Trump is smarter than you think

Donald Trump sucks intellectual energy more effectively than anything else we have ever seen. 2 min read in Medium — April 25, 2020

Hack from Home winners!

My team Health Traffic Lights won Hack from Home COVID-19 hackathon 4–5 April. The project is now called 'sharetrace' and aims to develop a truly private exposure and risk assessment solution to the coronavirus pandemic. More about the project at sharetrace.org — April 15, 2020

Virus outbreak/zombie movies to watch

Having to spend lots of time indoors recently? Take the opportunity to educate yourself with a timely selection of virus outbreak/zombie movies. 1 min read in Medium — April 7, 2020

The right time to take action?

A decision when to take an action can be just as important as the action that is taken. 2 min read in Medium — March 26, 2020

The more you measure them...

...the more they will game you. A brief summary of our findings on the use of people analytics with Marta Stelmaszak. 4 min read in Medium — January 10, 2020