Project Level Decision Rights: A Contingency Perspective

The study of IT development governance rests on the assumption of goal difference between the procurer (customer or user) and the provider (development organization). But governance research also finds that the knowledge of both parties must be incorporated in order to maximize decision effectiveness. The goal difference is resolved through governance forms that assign different decisions to the procurer and the provider. But this splitting of decision rights can impact how knowledge is shared. At the same time, unified teams are also capable of completing effective development projects as witnessed by the successes of agile development methodologies. These teams do not split decision rights and knowledge is more readily shared. Successful projects under one governance model may be identifiably different from successful projects under the other. This study extends governance research by understanding development project characteristics that indicate whether splitting decision rights is an effective strategy for a specific project

GOVERNANCE FOR MOBILE SERVICE PLATFORMS: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Mobile service platforms are IT-based marketplaces that have become the source of competitive advantages. Aligning the interests of stakeholders by establishing effective governance mechanisms is central to the success of mobile service platforms. This phenomenon ignites research in many disciplines, which results in a fragmented understanding of mobile service platforms. This paper is a first step towards establishing a comprehensive understanding of the role of governance mechanisms in mobile service platforms. We review the literature and develop a theoretical modular framework which provides an outline for the analysis and conceptualization of mobile service platform governance. This also provides help to identify promising research avenues

Sacrificing the Holy Cows: A Firm-Level Study of Using Willingness-to-Cannibalize to Drive Innovative Software Project Management

Building on extant literature in innovation management and marketing, we develop a factor model for explaining firm value innovation that can be reflected in their systems project management. Our model focuses on value innovation and analyzes it from the aspect of willingness-to-cannibalize affected by firm size and inter-firm linkages. We highlight the mediating role of willingness-to-cannibalize that may reconcile the different views about the roles of firm size and inter-firm linkages in firm innovation. We test the model by conducting a survey involving 113 Taiwanese software firms. Our data show a good fit to the model and support all but two of the hypotheses it suggests. The model can explain a significant portion of the variance in value innovation as well as willingness-to-cannibalize. Our findings have several implications for systems project management that we also discuss

GOVERNANCE FOR MOBILE SERVICE PLATFORMS: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Mobile service platforms are IT-based marketplaces that have become the source of competitive advantages. Aligning the interests of stakeholders by establishing effective governance mechanisms is central to the success of mobile service platforms. This phenomenon ignites research in many disciplines, which results in a fragmented understanding of mobile service platforms. This paper is a first step towards establishing a comprehensive understanding of the role of governance mechanisms in mobile service platforms. We review the literature and develop a theoretical modular framework which provides an outline for the analysis and conceptualization of mobile service platform governance. This also provides help to identify promising research avenues

Knowledge Overlap in Nearshore Service Delivery

Multinational organizations now increasingly source tasks from nearshore units. While, offshore locations promise superior opportunities for cost savings and access to large scale, flexible workforces, organisations are increasingly distributing work much closer to home (Deliotte 2014). One of the biggest attractions of nearshore locations is proximity. In principle nearshore units are geographically, temporally, and culturally closer to their onshore counterparts reducing the cost and coordination effort to manage distance. Despite the anticipation that onshore units and nearshore units will operate effectively from distinctive and separate knowledge bases, they continue to be bogged down by knowledge overlaps. Knowledge overlaps (KOs) are a duplication of information and know-how of specific migrated activities that allow onshore units to retain control of nearshore units. In this paper, we draw on data from an on-going qualitative case study to demonstrate how nearshore units manage KOs and relinquish control of processes

Up in the cloud: Understanding the chasm between expectations and reality

CEOs increasingly demand their IT function to fully exploit the opportunities of cloud computing for their company. At the same time, we observe that employees make experiences with cloud services in their private life, which they seamlessly transfer and expect in the workplace - a phenomenon called cloud consumerization. Thereby, employees use self-deployed cloud services for solving business problems which they find more useful than the IT products provided by work. In light of these revolutionary changes, we propose that user experiences and outcomes are contingent on the process through which cloud services are adopted in companies. Systemizing cloud adoption as a continuum of top-down and bottom-up processes, we assume that adoption processes are distinct with respect to users’ social and governance context. In this paper, we outline the theoretical and methodological foundation, provide details on the expected theoretical contributions and give information regarding next steps of our research project

Conceptualizing Control Configurations: A Control Theory Perspective on Outsourced Information Systems Development

Past research on information systems development outsourcing (ISD-outsourcing) has found control theory to be a useful perspective for examining the co-ordination between the client and the vendor. Research on ISD-outsourcing has uncovered two distinct control mechanisms: structural and process control mechanisms. The structural control mechanism describes “what”, that is, the structure of the control mode, whereas the process control mechanism explains “how”, that is the process through which the control mode is enacted. Although the control literature discusses structural and process control mechanisms, it does not describe the ways in which control mechanisms can be combined for ensuring project success. Grounded in case study data from fifteen interviews in eight ISD-outsourcing projects, we conceptualise five control configurations describing the different combinative patterns of control mechanisms within and across control modes. Then, we identify the relationship between control configuration types and ISD-outsourcing project success

IT Governance Mechanisms and Administration/IT Alignment in the Public Sector: A Conceptual Model and Case Validation

The mechanisms of information technology (IT) governance have been widely recognized as practices to sustain alignment of business and IT units. However, the IT governance literature so far has drawn little attention to the possible idiosyncrasies of governance arrangements in the public sector. In this paper we propose a conceptual model to investigate the relationship between IT governance mechanisms and according performance outcomes specifically for public sector organizations. A survey instrument is developed and validated based on in-depth interviews with IT representatives from three different municipalities in Germany. A cross-case analysis particularly provides evidence for the importance of structural and relational mechanisms and demonstrates how different mechanisms can compensate each other. Our findings provide relevant insights for government practitioners and an impetus for further research

Enhancing Software-As-A-Service With Insufficient Domain Knowledge

This study addresses the question “How do Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors enhance their software with insufficient domain knowledge?” Results were obtained by analyzing a dataset from a SaaS vendor that provides administrative software to small schools around the world. The dataset includes archived data (email messages, company documents, and Skype messages) and access to the company’s online repositories (sales pipeline, client online chats, and engineering repository). We identified three types of domain knowledge that are relevant to SaaS vendors – organization specific, industry-wide, and regional variation. We also generated six propositions explaining how industry-wide and regional variation knowledge influences the SaaS enhancement process, and at which points in the process these two types of domain knowledge come into play. This study refines our current knowledge by highlighting the unfolding stages between insufficient levels of domain knowledge and software enhancement outcomes