An Exploratory Study about Microblogging Acceptance at Work

Microblogging is the new Web 2.0 hype in the media. Techies, politicians, family members and many more use Twitter to keep in touch with their interest groups, their voters or their friends and relatives. We wanted to know whether Twitter can also keep us aware about our team colleagues, how this improves teamwork and finally why Twitter is accepted and used in teams. Based on an action research study about Twitter usage in a team of seven researchers and the findings of prior literature, we attempt to extend the unified theory of technology acceptance (Venkatesh 2003) and adapt it to the specific context of microblogging in teams. Extending the performance expectancy construct, we propose two groups of factors inherent to social software that should be integrated into the UTAUT: the task characteristics of other users and the individual motivations for using social software

DESIGN AND IMPACT OF AWARENESS FUNCTIONS - A STUDY ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA IN VIRTUAL TEAMS

The usage of social media in leisure time settings has become a prominent research topic. However, less research has been done on the design of social media in collaboration settings. In this study, we investigate how social media can support asynchronous collaboration in virtual teams and specifically how they can increase activity awareness. On the basis of an open source social networking platform, we present two prototype designs: a standard platform with basic support for information processing, communication and process ? as suggested by Zigurs and Buckland (1998) ? and an advanced platform with additional support for activity awareness via special feed functions. We argue that the standard platform already conveys activity awareness to a certain extent, however, that this awareness can be increased even more by the feeds in the advanced platform. Both prototypes are tested in a field experiment and evaluated with respect to their impact on perceived activity awareness, coordination and satisfaction. We show that the advanced design increases coordination and satisfaction through increased perceived activity awareness

The Role of Reuse in the Successive Implementation of Conversational Agents

More and more companies rely on the implementation of conversational agents (CAs) to automate certain of their processes. While CAs' initial development often mirrors an innovative process, their successive implementation can be made more efficient by drawing on other CAs' prior developments. We rely on data from a case study where a series of chatbots (which represent one type of CAs) was implemented. Routine theoretical concepts help us better understand how CAs may dynamically evolve and how their implementation can be accelerated. We found that a) the reuse of emerging or intentionally constructed means may allow accelerating the implementation of multiple successive CAs, b) means can be reused to extend or transfer functionality (through mutation or inheritance); and c) changes in the conversational context determine if means can be reused directly or not (through reproduction or recreation)

Tight versus Loose Organizational Coupling within Inter-Firm Networks in the Enterprise Software Industry – The Perspective of Complementors

Facilitated by new standards and middleware technologies, enterprise application software is increasingly characterized by a high degree of modularity. On an organizational level, this is reflected by the goal of dominant system vendors (hubs) to form loosely-coupled hub-and-spoke networks with smaller niche players (spokes) that complement their solutions. This paper aims at explaining differences regarding the extent to which spokes strive for loosely-coupled partnerships as opposed to closely-tied relationships with a particular hub. The type of coupling is indicated by the level of hub-specific investments and the application of informal governance mechanisms. Following existing theory, the synergistic specificity between the partners’ technological, commercial, and social capital is suggested to determine the aspired type of coupling. Moreover, it is argued that a tighter coupling leads to an increased threat of opportunism. However, instead of loosening the partnership, spokes tie themselves even closer to the hub

Mastering Software Robot Development Projects: Understanding the Association between System Attributes & Design Practices

Software robots tend to increasingly take over organizational processes. However, little is known about principles of developing as opposed to using robotic systems, such as RPA robots and chatbots. Therefore, based on a comparative case study, this paper elaborates how different types of robots, due to distinguishing system attributes, relate to different design practices that arise from varying challenges of transforming existing routines into robots

The Influence of product-specific determinants on software firms’ international entry mode choices

In an environment of globalization of software and IT services, providing software solutions in international markets has become a strategic necessity for many software firms. When setting up international business operations, software firms need to make a fundamental choice on the distribution arrangements for software and related services in foreign markets. Particularly, such arrangements may either involve contracting with local partners to distribute products and services or extending the firm abroad by establishing wholly-owned subsidiaries or deploying employees. This study focuses on analyzing such boundary choices of software product firms in international markets. Taking a knowledge-based perspective, a research model is developed that outlines the influence of software product and service characteristics on software firms’ international entry mode choices. The research model is tested using PLS based on survey data from internationally operating software firms. The study findings support the knowledge-based reasoning that unique knowledge inherent in a software product that may be required during the sales process can be more easily transferred within firm boundaries. Particularly, the results point out the need for software firms to enter foreign markets through company-owned channels (i.e., wholly-owned subsidiaries or employee deployment) if the business processes and the functionality reflected in software product are highly specific. Likewise, company-owned channels are chosen if a high share of complementary services (e.g., implementation, consulting, training, maintenance, and support) is provided along with the introduction of a software product in a foreign market. In contrast, if significant country-specific adaptations of software products need to be performed, in particular language localization, the required knowledge is most effectively integrated through cooperation with local sales partners

Offshoring of Application Services in the Banking Industry – A Transaction Cost Analysis

Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for information systems (IS) offshoring. However, many offshoring projects have failed to achieve expected cost savings, indicating that labor cost savings are offset by additional costs that arise in offshoring projects in certain situations. While previous research on IS offshoring has mostly focused on management issues in offshoring, the focus of this paper is to improve our understanding why the realization of economic benefits varies substantially between offshored software projects. Based on a conceptual framework from transaction cost economics and empirical data from an in-depth case study involving six software development and maintenance projects that were offshored to software vendors in India by a major German financial services organization, two research questions are studied. First, what types of additional costs may arise in offshored software projects? Second, how and why do additional costs vary between projects, considering both task and offshore characteristics? The findings from our analysis indicate that offshoring can lead to increased effort on the client side, both in terms of production costs (requirements specification, knowledge transfer, conceptual development) and transaction costs (vendor coordination, and control). These additional costs are particularly high when the outsourced function is highly asset specific. Moreover, offshore country characteristics such as cultural differences, geographic distance as well as vendor characteristics such as the degree of personnel fluctuation and lack of absorptive capacity can lead to cost add-ons at the client side – in particular when a high degree of human asset specificity is involved in the offshored software projects

How Social Media-Enabled Communication Awareness Enhances Project Team Performance

Project teams increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication. In this paper, we propose that communication within these teams benefits from a communication-awareness feature that summarizes communication at one common place. We argue that such a feature pays out specifically during action episodes, when team members engage in taskwork. We conducted two studies of 51 and 35 project teams to examine how the amount of communication during action episodes relates to team performance under low versus high communication awareness. In both studies, we technologically designed communication awareness as the availability of a feed, known from social media platforms, that displays all team-internal, computer-mediated communication. The results show that the communication-awareness feature makes communication during action episodes more beneficial, both in term of effectiveness and efficiency. Zooming into the temporal patterns of communication during action episodes further reveals that high-performing teams in the high-communication-awareness condition stick out by early and steady communication. Implications for current and future research on team communication and awareness support are discussed

Why do complementors participate? An analysis of partnership networks in the enterprise software industry

In the enterprise software industry, large providers (hubs) are fostering partner networks with smaller companies (spokes) that complement their platforms. This study takes the perspective of these spokes and seeks to understand their motivation to partner. It is the first to simultaneously examine two theoretical perspectives that help explain partnership formation. The input-oriented perspective holds that organizations enter inter-firm arrangements in order to access external resources and capabilities. The output-oriented perspective posits that the complementarity of the partners’ products influences the benefits obtained from a partnership. In order to examine the relevancy and possible interaction of these two perspectives, a multiple-case study is conducted. Qualitative data from 17 spoke organizations is gathered and thoroughly analyzed. The study confirms that the hub's reputation and its capability to provide integrated systems are generally important reasons for partnering. However, the extent to which the hub’s innovativeness and its commercial capital motivate spokes to partner varies substantially. The key finding of this study is that these variations can be explained by differences in the level of product complementarity. This leads to the conclusion that there is a widely neglected interaction effect between the input- and outputoriented perspectives in explaining the formation of hub-and-spoke partnerships