Introduction

Dear Prof. Christian Borgs,

I would like to formally welcome you to this special thesis outline.

My name is André-Paul Widera and I hereby declare my intention to write my Master’s thesis with you in the course of the Research and Teaching Fellowship between UC Berkeley and the MCI.

To that end, I specifically designed this digital presence and carefully considered how best to share my ideas on making a meaningful impact in research with you.

Without further ado, please allow me to present my thoughts on this.

Description. In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Christian Ploder, this paper presents a comprehensive case study recently submitted to ICAI-TEMS — a newly launched conference under the flagship conference of the IEEE.

Why I am eager to engage in research

Driven by genuine passion for education and grounded in both personal and professional experience, I embarked on research to deepen my understanding of why companies encounter impeding effects when transforming their business digitally.

What I have already contributed to research

To apply theory, I conducted a five-month case study in a German SME during my Bachelor’s according to Yin (2018). While this deepened my understanding of hindering factors in digital transformation processes and led to two paper submissions (KMO, ICAI-TEMS) with Prof. Dr. Christian Ploder, I remain aware that I have only begun to uncover the deeper layers of the phenomenon.

How I am going to approach research refinement

To build upon my previously conducted research, I have identified several methodological enhancements for my Master’s thesis, including

• transforming my initial literature review (Bachelor’s thesis) into a systematic literature review or meta-analysis to minimize selection bias,
• expanding my single-case study into a multiple-case study to gain a broader and more nuanced perspective on the phenomenon, and
• employing computational linguistic techniques to enhance Mayring’s (2000) qualitative content analysis, as emphasized by Yin (2018) to limit investigator bias.

Against this backdrop, I prompted the formulation of the following research question for my Master’s thesis:

Why do hindering factors occur that paralyze digital transformation processes?

Graph theory as an analytical tool

To enhance the validity of my findings, I have considered incorporating graph theory to reconstruct the causal interrelationships among hindering factors.

While this approach has the potential to strengthen analytical robustness, it also introduces significant methodological challenges. As Yin (2018) implicitly notes, incorporating multiple perspectives in data triangulation can produce conflicting narratives, resulting in directed cyclic graphs that obscure clear causal inference.

Such structures risk implying that each factor causes all others equally — an outcome inconsistent with both organizational theory and consultancy practice, where influence is typically asymmetric.

At present, alongside various computational approaches — such as the application of the PageRank algorithm, which may provide partial insights — I am developing a theoretical model that synthesizes concepts from organizational, model, and graph theory. The objective is to establish a quantitatively rigorous analytical framework that remains theoretically coherent and methodologically robust.

The significance of your domain expertise

In addition to your earlier contributions that bridged molecular biology and combinatorics to engage with complex interdisciplinary challenges (Bailly-Bechet et al., 2011), your efforts as early as 2008 to cultivate dialog between computer science and the social sciences during your tenure at the Microsoft Research Lab in New England further underscore your commitment to cross-disciplinary integration.

Based upon this, I believe that a collaboration based on the convergence of our respective expertise has the potential to be mutually enriching and to contribute meaningfully to this line of inquiry.

Description. Using Python and NetworkX within Visual Studio Code, I tentatively conducted a generation of an image that visualizes the interrelationships among all hindering factors identified through expert interviews from my previously carried out case study.

Summary

Having had the opportunity to show you that I am

• deeply committed to advancing high-quality research, driven by a genuine passion for academia, as demonstrated by the submission of two papers during my current tenure as an active researcher, and
• eager to pursue research under your co-advisorship, given your expertise and the strong alignment of our complementary research interests,

this underscores my strong belief that collaborating with you on my Master’s thesis as part of the aforementioned Research and Teaching Fellowship between UC Berkeley and the MCI will not only be highly beneficial — both academically and in practice — but also satisfy my eagerness to

detect the inmost force, which binds the world, and guides its course.

— Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and (translated by) Bayard Taylor

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you require any additional information or documentation!

Yours sincerely,

André-Paul Widera.