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Blockchain technology has the potential to resolve trust concerns in cross-organizational workflows and to reduce reliance on paper-based documents as trust anchors. Although these prospects are real, so is regulatory uncertainty. In particular, the reconciliation of blockchain with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is proving to be a significant challenge. We tackled this challenge with the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Here, we explain how we used Action Research to guide the Federal Office in creating a GDPR-compliant blockchain solution for the German asylum procedure. Moreover, we explain the architecture of the Federal Office's solution and present two design principles for developing GDPRcompliant blockchain solutions for crossorganizational workflow management.

As an emergent variant of digital and smart services, proactive services (PAS) do not wait for customers to make the first move, but proactively participate in customers’ lives and make decisions on their behalf. Due to their novelty, the literature on PAS is in its infancy. Specifically, there is a lack of guidance on designing PAS to meet customer needs. Hence, we examined how customers assess specific features of PAS and whether their assessments differ according to personality traits. To this end, we conducted an online survey via the crowdsourcing platform Prolific, which yielded 259 valid responses. We used a methodological combination of the Kano model, self-stated importance method, and the Five Factor model. Our results reveal that, at the moment, customers do not value features of PAS related to autonomy and that customers engage in paradoxical behavior when assessing the use of personal data. These results allow for a more precise classification and prioritization of the features of PAS tuned to a customer’s most prevalent personality trait.

Thanks to digital technologies, information about customer needs and contexts is becoming accessible ever more easily and service providers are more closely connected to customers. This development enables services to act on behalf of customers and to proactively initiate the customer interactions. Such services are so-called proactive smart services (PASS) and are a subgroup of smart services. Research suggests that service providers often face the challenge to gain customers’ acceptance of innovative services. In response to this call for action and the change in customer interaction, which can have far-reaching consequences in the lives of customers, we examined the antecedents that explain customers’ acceptance of PASS using a contextualized approach. Hence, we identified PASS-specific antecedents, developed a contextualized acceptance model (UTAUT2-PASS) while drawing from general acceptance theory, and validated it empirically. A comparison of our contextualized model with UTAUT2 as an established yet uncontextualized model confirmed the outperformance of our contextualized model. Our findings advance the academic understanding of PASS and help service providers design PASS for customer acceptance.