Engagement of Information Systems Professionals in Open Source Software Development

Open source (OS) development of software is becoming increasingly desirable for individuals and organizations alike. Organizations that heavily resisted this new way of developing software are now actively participating in this process. Participation of information systems (IS) professionals in the open source environment has been a focal point in this stream of research in information systems. The dissertation goes beyond participation and examines engagement of IS professionals in the open source environment. The concept of engagement facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between a person and a his or her work. The three essays in the dissertation examine three aspects of IS professional’s engagement in the open source domain: job engagement, platform engagement, and continued participation. The first essay, using the job characteristics model as a theoretical framework, explores the role of job characteristics in driving job engagement and job satisfaction in open source projects. The second essay examines factors that can influence IS professionals continued contribution to future activities of an open source development platform. Using the social exchange theory, the second essay examines how perceived justice of rewards in OS projects can impact IS professionals’ platform engagement and intention to participate in future platform activities. The third essay explores the role of external feedbacks in open source projects. Using the signaling theory, this essay examines how characteristics of external feedback can interact with motivations to influence continued participation intention. The three essays are expected to enrich the information systems literature by providing new insights on various factors that can enhance engagement of IS professionals in the open source domain. The essays also contribute to the IS literature by applying the job characteristics model, social exchange theory, and signaling theory in the context of open source development

The Impact of Anonymous Peripheral Contributions on Open Source Software Development

Online peer production communities such as open source software (OSS) projects attract both identified and anonymous peripheral contributions (APC) (e.g., defect reports, feature requests, or forum posts). While we can attribute identified peripheral contributions (IPC) to specific individuals and OSS projects need them to succeed, one cannot trace back anonymous peripheral contributions (APC), and they can have both positive and negative ramifications for project development. Open platforms and managers face a challenging design choice in deciding whether to allow APC and for which tasks or what type of projects. We examine the impact that the ratio between APC and IPC has on OSS project performance. Our results suggest that the OSS projects perform the best when they contain a uniform anonymity level (i.e., they contain predominantly APC or predominantly IPC). However, our results also suggest that OSS projects have lower performance when the ratio between APC and IPC nears one (i.e., they contain close to the same number of APC and IPC). Furthermore, our results suggest that these results differ depending on the type of application that a project develops. Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about the implications of anonymity for online communities and informs managers about the effect that anonymous contributions have on their projects

Decision-making Processes in Community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software-development Teams with Internal Governance: An Extension to Decision-making Theory

Community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) teams with internal governance constitute an extreme example of distributed teams, prominent in software development. At the core of distributed team success lies team decision making and execution. However, in FLOSS teams, one might expect the lack of formal organizational structures to guide practices and reliance on asynchronous communication to make decision making problematic. Despite these challenges, many effective FLOSS teams exist. We lack research on how organizations make IS development decisions in general and on FLOSS decision-making models in particular. The decision-making literature on FLOSS teams has focused on the distribution of decision-making power. Therefore, it remains unclear which decision-making theories fit the FLOSS context best or whether we require novel decision-making models. We adopted a process-based perspective to analyze decision making in five community-based FLOSS teams. We identified five different decision-making processes, which indicates that FLOSS teams use multiple processes when making decisions. Decision-making behaviors remained stable across projects even though they required different types of knowledge. We help fill the literature gap about which FLOSS decision mechanisms one can explain using classical decision-making theories. Practically, community and company leaders can use knowledge of these decision processes to develop infrastructure that fits FLOSS decision-making processes

The incongruity of misfit: A systematic literature review and research agenda

For decades, research on person-environment (P-E) fit has been a prevalent topic, emphasizing alignment between employees and the work environment and the accompanying positive consequences that flow from good fit. However, given the frequency of change and volatility experienced in organizations, it is far more likely that individuals, work groups, and organizations will sporadically experience misfit with various aspects of the environment. This recognition has led to steady growth in misfit research, but this literature lacks conceptual clarity, provides differing views on the interplay between fit and misfit, and as a result, insights on the consequences of misfit are fragmented. To address these shortcomings, we conduct a systematic review the misfit literature, analyzing 106 scholarly articles published between 1981 and 2021. Our review is guided by the following questions: (1) What is misfit and how is it measured? (2) How does it develop, grow, and change over time, and (3) What are its antecedents and outcomes? Our review offers three key contributions. First, we identify four distinct conceptualizations of misfit from the literature and then offer an integrative definition of misfit as the recognition of misalignment with one or more aspects of the environment experienced in moments, as events occur, or as situations evolve. Second, we provide a multilevel synthesis of the antecedents and outcomes of misfit that highlights the need for more cross-level and multilevel research. Third, we lay out a rich and detailed agenda of future research to further enhance our knowledge of misfit as a concept distinct from its P-E fit roots

The Impact of Corporate Engagement in Open-Source Enterprise Systems Community on Release Performance

With the rise of corporate-sponsored open-source software (OSS) projects in the software industry, open-source enterprise systems (OS-ES) have become essential alternatives for small businesses to adopt and use the advanced business software packages. With a longitudinal study of a mature, collectively developed open source software project, we examine how corporate-communal engagement affects OS-ES performance through the theoretical perspective of group faultlines. Further, we propose that various release types can moderate the relationship between corporate-communal engagement and OS-ES release performance. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with a final data set consisting of 124 data points (i.e., releases periods), we find that the relationship between corporate-communal engagement and OS-ES release performance is best characterized as a curvilinear relationship (U-shape relationship). That is, the evenness of corporate-communal engagement results in a reduced OS-ES release performance, and the unevenness of corporate-communal engagement can increase the OS-ES release performance in the forms of improved quality and innovativeness. Moreover, this curvilinear relationship is likely to be weaker in consolidating releases than in expanding releases. We find that our propositions are supported by the data. This dissertation provides various theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, we advance a theoretical framework to understand the effects and outcomes of corporate-communal engagement and release type contingencies by applying group faultlines theory to explain our research model. Further, we propose an alternative perspective on understanding software releases by distinguishing OS-ES releases into consolidating and expanding releases. Practically, this study provides suggestions and insights for corporate managers, open-source leaders, and small businesses to better engage in OS-ES development and adopt proper OS-ES products

Empirical Test Guidelines for Content Validity: Wash, Rinse, and Repeat until Clean

Empirical research in information systems relies heavily on developing and validating survey instruments. However, researchers’ efforts to evaluate content validity of survey scales are often inconsistent, incomplete, or unreported. Thjs paper defines and describes the most significant facets of content validity and illustrates the mechanisms through which multi-item psychometric scales capture a latent construct’s content. We discuss competing methods and propose new methods to assemble a comprehensive set of metrics and methods to evaluate content validity. The resulting recommendations for researchers evaluating content validity emphasize an iterative pre-study process (wash, rinse, and repeat until clean) to objectively establish “fit for purpose” when developing and adapting survey scales. A sample pre-study demonstrates suitable methods for creating confidence that scales reliably capture the theoretical essence of latent constructs. We demonstrate the efficacy of these methods using a randomized field experiment

The Impact of Ideology Misfit on Open Source Software Communities and Companies

Corporate involvement in open source software (OSS) communities has increased substantially in recent years. Often this takes the form of company employees devoting their time to contribute code to the efforts of projects in these communities. Ideology has traditionally served to motivate, coordinate, and guide volunteer contributions to OSS communities. As employees represent an increasing proportion of the participants in OSS communities, the role of OSS ideology in guiding their commitment and code contributions is unknown. In this research, we argue that OSS ideology misfit has important implications for companies and the OSS communities to which their employees contribute, since their engagement in such communities is not necessarily voluntary. We conceptualize two different types of misfit: OSS ideology under-fit, whereby an employee embraces an OSS ideology more than their coworkers or OSS community do, and OSS ideology over-fit, whereby an employee perceives that their coworkers or OSS community embrace the OSS ideology more strongly than the employee does. To develop a set of hypotheses about the implications of these two types of misfit for employee commitment to the company and commitment to the OSS community, we draw on self-determination theory. We test the hypotheses in a field study of 186 employees who participate in an OSS community. We find that OSS ideology under-fit impacts the company and the community in the same way: it decreases employee commitment to the company and commitment to the OSS community. In contrast, we find that OSS ideology over-fit increases commitment to the company but decreases commitment to the OSS community. Finally, we find that employees’ commitment to their company reinforces the impact of their commitment to the OSS community in driving ongoing code contributions. This provides a holistic view of OSS ideology and its impacts among an increasingly pervasive yet understudied type of participant in OSS research. It provides insights for companies that are considering assigning their employees to work in OSS communities as well as for OSS communities that are partnering with these companies

Products, Platforms, and Open Innovation: Three Essays on Technology Innovation

High technology industries, where IT artifacts are core to the business model of a firm, are marked by a high level of market competition and uncertainty. Firms within these industries are constantly evolving at a swift pace. Products and services developed in these industries have the shortest life cycle from product development to maturity, compared to those developed in other industries. According to a 2015 KPMG report, products and services in the high technology industry have an average maturity life cycle of 0.5 - 5 years, which is the shortest among all sectors (KPMG, 2015). Value generation and capture from these products and services must happen in a shorter duration compared to those from other industries. Imitation of products and services in these industries is also rampant, diminishing opportunities to generate value from innovative products and services. According to extant research, imitation among vendors in the IT sector is widespread, and firms mimic direct competitors in the introduction and withdrawal of products and services (Ruckman et al., 2015; Rhee et al., 2006). While the inherent nature of products developed in the IT industry and the associated incremental innovation leads to better performance gains, these gains erode quickly via imitation from firms competing in the same domain (Ethiraj et al., 2008). For many firms, these issues lead to a shift in their revenue generation model. Rather than appropriating the value from direct sales of products and services, firms have slowly started opting for innovation strategies that allow rent-seeking through opening up the business and revenue models of the firm. These strategies may include but are not limited to, adopting open standards for their products and services, establishing platform business models and engaging in open innovation. In this thesis, I assess these three innovation strategies and their value to a firm in terms of product and services and related value performance. In the first essay of this thesis, I start by examining the lifecycle of products in information technology-intensive firms, which is deemed to be shorter compared to other industries. I call these products complex assembled digital products (CADP). In the product innovation literature, the emergence of a dominant design configuration in a product category is seen as the start of a technological lifecycle that allows winners of the industry to appropriate long-term returns through incremental innovation. In the context of a complex assembled digital product, a dominant design will manifest itself as a single dominant design configuration or a narrow set of configurations that represent a majority of the products manufactured in a product category (Tushman & Murmann, 1998; Cecere et al., 2015). However, in technology-intensive firms, two challenges need further exploration. Firstly, due to the pace of innovation in technology-intensive industries, it is highly likely that a dominant design configuration never emerges (Srinivasan et al., 2006). Secondly, due to the modular nature of the products, even if a dominant design is achieved, it is achieved at the configurational level. It manifests itself as the set of components that achieves dominance in a product configuration (Murmann & Frenken, 2006). In the first essay, I examine the evolutionary attributes of the components of a CADP, which enable the components to become and remain part of the dominant design configuration of the product for a longer duration. I model the entry and survival of a component in a dominant design configuration using three evolutionary attributes: (1) pleiotropy of the component, (2) openness of the standard supporting the component, and (3) innovation source of the component. Pleiotropy as a construct is adapted from evolutionary biology and defined as the number of functionalities supported by a component. The standard supporting a component can be open or proprietary. The innovation source can be internal to the industry or external. I empirically test my hypotheses using a rich, longitudinal dataset of TV models spanning 15 years (2002-2016). The results show that components that have higher pleiotropy and that are supported by open standards not only have a higher chance of being selected into the dominant design configuration of TVs but also remain in the TV market for a longer time. However, while components developed through endogenous innovation efforts were nearly four times more likely to enter the dominant design configuration of TVs, their longevity was not significantly different from that of the components sourced exogenously. In the first essay, I look at how adopting components with specific sets of attributes allows firms to win a product market and appropriate value for a long duration from product development. In the second essay, I shift my focus from a product-based business model to a platform business model as an innovation strategy to achieve a competitive advantage. In recent years we have observed the emergence of platform businesses across domains of information technology-intensive industries (van Alystyne and Parker 2016). Firms are either completely shifting to platform business models or starting to include platform business models as part of their business strategy portfolios. Newer firms in these industries are more likely to adopt a platform business model as the core model for value generation and value capture. Seven of the ten most valuable companies in the world have opted for a platform business model as part of their overall business strategy (Cusumano et al., 2019). However, not all firms adopting the platform business model succeed in dominating the market. An exploratory study examined the success of platform businesses in terms of the number of years the firm remained in business. Taking a 20 years dataset of the firms in US markets, it was observed that only 43 out of 252 platform firms flourished are still active (Yoffie et al., 2019). Most of the surviving firms have to spend a considerable amount of resources in incentivizing the stakeholders of the platform, R&D, and marketing activities to stay relevant in the market (Cusumano, 2020). In Essay Two, I investigate the effect of a platform innovation on a firm’s performance under competitive threats. As argued earlier, technology-intensive firms operate in an ever-changing environment where competition is continuously evolving and mimicking the products of the focal firm. This constantly evolving product market competition is inherent in high technology industries. While product market competition encourages the overall pace of innovation as seen in technology-intensive industries, we are not aware of its effect on value generated by the firms operating in those industries. In the second Essay, I model the effect of product market competition on a firm’s performance. I look at how adopting a platform business model mitigates the effect of product market competition on a firm’s value generation. I use a machine learning-based firm classification method to measure the business model adopted by a firm. I extracted data from 10-K annual reports of the sample firms and classified the firms as platform or non-platform based on the supervised classification of 10-K annual reports of the firm. Using a 20-year panel of the firm’s financial data and their business classification, I explore the effect of a platform business model on a firm’s performance under high product market competition. My results suggest that adopting a platform business model can be an effective business strategy in delivering better value in general and under high market competition in particular. A third innovation strategy that has found favor with firms in recent years to build a competitive advantage over rivals is engaging in open innovation. Open innovation is defined as “a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology” (Chesbrough, 2003). In the context of information technology-intensive firms, open innovation manifests itself in many ways. In recent years, for-profit firms have started engaging with open-source communities to develop products and services on social coding platforms like GitHub. According to my investigation, 41 of the top 100 firms by market valuation have a direct presence on GitHub and actively develop their products with support from open-source developer communities. Opening up open software products and services for the world is another way that allows for faster development and propagation of products across user and developer communities (Khan, 2018). Firms also sponsor open source community developed products and regularly sponsor summer coding schools and hackathons (Mitchell, 2012). These open innovation events have shown promise in the collaborative development of products and services (Tereweisch and Xu, 2008). Firms appropriate rents by selling complementary services for the products they are developing as open-source. In his famous 1997 book, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond coined the term “Cathedral” model of software development to represent the closed sourced, hierarchical and proprietary model of software development and “Bazaar” to represent the open-source, free and equality based software development model (Raymond, 1997). However, there is limited empirical evidence to suggest that firms create and capture value on open innovation platforms like GitHub (West et al., 2014). We do know that firms have started selective revealing of their accumulated knowledge and started engaging with open source communities (Fosfuri et al., 2008; Henkel et al., 2014; Alexy et al., 2018). In the third Essay, I investigate the effect of open-source engagement on the economic outcomes of a firm. More specifically, I look at how engagement on the open-source platform and intensity of that engagement influence the financial performance of a firm. To investigate the influence of open-source innovation on a firm’s financial performance, I created a data set containing all continuous open-source engagements of firms in high technology sectors. I collected this data from multiple sources, including GitHub, 10-K reports, and a search of innovation contests organized by firms. I then matched this data set with the financial information of the firms. I employed the generalized synthetic control method (GSynth) to estimate the model. I estimated the dynamic panel data regression model to measure the influence of open-source engagement intensity on financial performance. Additionally, I also investigated the heterogeneity in the effect of open-source engagement on the financial performance of the firm using the random causal forest. My results suggest that open-source engagement and its intensity positively influence the financial performance of a firm. The effects are heterogeneous and based on the absorptive capacity of the firm, market competition, and other environmental factors. I explore and discuss the implications of my findings on open-source engagement choices by firms. Finally, I conclude this dissertation with the findings of my essays and their implications on information technology-intensive firms. I provide additional details about my studies in the Appendices. The Appendices also highlight the additional analysis done during the research to test the robustness of the results. Overall, this dissertation has broader implications for research and practice alike. There are opportunities for future research and investigation into various innovation strategies adopted by firms in high technology industries. This research also provides directions for applying novel research methods, like the generalized synthetic control method and machine learning algorithms, in IS research

Modeling the Effects of Diversity and Corporations on Participation Dynamics in FLOSS Ecosystems

A multitude of societal issues associated with the development of technology have emerged over the years including, but not limited to: insufficient personnel for maintenance; a lack of accessibility; the spread of harmful tools; and bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. I propose that a systems perspective is necessary to identify potential leverage points in technology production systems to influence them towards increased social good and evaluate their effectiveness for intervention. Toward this end, I conducted a mixed-methods study of a widely-adopted approach in tech production, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development. A survey was distributed to elicit responses from FLOSS project contributors to characterize their perceptions of diversity and corporate involvement as they relate to participation decisions and information gathering activities in online platforms. To complement this, an analysis of data from FLOSS projects on GitHub was completed to model participation dynamics. Survey results indicate that contributors attend to information that is used to infer group diversity and information about corporate decision making related to FLOSS systems. Furthermore, the influence of this information on participation decisions varies on the basis of economic needs and sociopolitical beliefs. Analyses of eighteen project ecosystems, with over 9,000 contributors, reveal that projects with no to some corporate involvement generally have broader contributor and user bases than those that are owned by a company. Taken together, these findings suggest that the internal practices of companies involved in FLOSS can be perceived as opaque and controlling which is detrimental to both the expansion of a project\u27s contributor base and for increasing diversity across FLOSS ecosystems. This research highlights the need to differentiate projects on the basis of corporate involvement and community ethos to design appropriate interventions. A set of recommendations and research propositions are offered to improve inclusivity, equity, and sustainability in tech development