Aligning flexibility with uncertainty in software development arrangements through a contractual typology

Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the context of software development projects that allows firms to align design flexibility with design uncertainty at the project level. The theoretical lenses of contract theory and software engineering are used to explain why the five archetypes in the proposed typology provide gradually increasing levels of design flexibility and to develop hypotheses about the associations between design flexibility and a set of project cost dimensions. Design/methodology/approach The hypotheses are tested with objective contractual data from 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank over a period of three years. Findings Data analysis confirms the existence of the proposed typology and shows that design flexibility is negatively associated with control and positively associated with coordination, trust, duration and price. Research limitations/implications Although the findings are based on the contracting practices of a single, albeit sophisticated, organization, they shed light on the ability of firms to align flexibility with uncertainty at the onset of new projects by taking advantage of nuanced contractual mechanisms to produce a broader set of contractual archetypes. Originality/value This paper is the first in the outsourcing literature to analyze a nuanced contractual typology in software development projects through the perspectives of both contract theory and software engineering

Engaging Students in MIS Course through the Creation of e-Businesses: A Self Determination Theory Analysis

We describe an entrepreneurial approach for teaching a Management Information Systems (MIS) course. The course builds on the psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness to encourage student motivation and engagement. Students are required to create new electronic businesses and to build prototypes of their electronic web fronts. Students are also required to use the concepts taught in the course and to analyze the ventures’ strategies, related network externalities, as well as business processes and data analytics. The course was taught since 2009 to five classes with more than two hundred students. Using student evaluation questionnaires and four detailed interviews, we find that more than half of the students are enthusiastic about the new approach, feeling satisfied and even proud of their projects. However, a minority of students found the course over-complicated and even boring. We found also that students who expressed autonomy orientation engaged with the course, while students who expressed impersonal or controlled orientation did not. We believe that this analysis should help instructors in aligning new teaching opportunities created by IT to fit students’ orientations and needs

Electronic Structure and Magnetic Properties of Solids

We review basic computational techniques for simulations of various magnetic properties of solids. Several applications to compute magnetic anisotropy energy, spin wave spectra, magnetic susceptibilities and temperature dependent magnetisations for a number of real systems are presented for illustrative purposes.Comment: Review article; To appear in Journal of Computational Crystallograph

Non-quasiparticle states in Co2_2MnSi evidenced through magnetic tunnel junction spectroscopy measurements

We investigate the effects of electronic correlations in the full-Heusler Co$_2$MnSi, by combining a theoretical analysis of the spin-resolved density of states with tunneling-conductance spectroscopy measurements using Co$_2$MnSi as electrode. Both experimental and theoretical results confirm the existence of so-called non-quasiparticle states and their crucial contribution to the finite-temperature spin polarisation in this material.Comment: Repalced Fig. 1. of PRL, 100, 086402 (2008), better k-space resolution for DOS around Fermi energ

Strategies for Competing in the Automotive Industry’s Software Ecosystem: Standards and Bottlenecks

The automotive industry includes many actors engaged in software that span small and large companies within old and new sectors. This paper focuses on the controlling position of car manufacturers in the automotive software ecosystem and suggests three strategies for participating software innovators – contesting, cooperating and circumventing. The strategies are exemplified with current cases: Tesla as contestation, Bosch cooperation with a car manufacturer in a data collection project as a basis for future services, and circumventing in a project based on the mobile Internet

Correlated band theory of spin and orbital contributions to Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions

A new approach for calculations of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in molecules and crystals is proposed. It is based on the exact perturbation expansion of total energy of weak ferromagnets in the canting angle with the only assumption of local Hubbard-type interactions. This scheme leads to a simple and transparent analytical expression for Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector with a natural separation into spin and orbital contributions. The main problem was transferred to calculations of effective tight-binding parameters in the properly chosen basis including spin-orbit coupling. Test calculations for La$_2$CuO$_4$ give the value of canting angle in a good agreement with experimental data.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

First-principles modelling of magnetic excitations in Mn12

We have developed a fully microscopic theory of magnetic properties of the prototype molecular magnet Mn12. First, the intra-molecular magnetic properties have been studied by means of first-principles density functional-based methods, with local correlation effects being taken into account within the local density approximation plus U (LDA+U) approach. Using the magnetic force theorem, we have calculated the interatomic isotropic and anisotropic exchange interactions and full tensors of single-ion anisotropy for each Mn ion. Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction parameters turned out to be unusually large, reflecting a low symmetry of magnetic pairs in molecules, in comparison with bulk crystals. Based on these results we predict a distortion of ferrimagnetic ordering due to DM interactions. Further, we use an exact diagonalization approach allowing to work with as large Hilbert space dimension as 10^8 without any particular symmetry (the case of the constructed magnetic model). Based on the computational results for the excitation spectrum, we propose a distinct interpretation of the experimental inelastic neutron scattering spectra.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Physical Review

Half-metallicity in NiMnSb: a Variational Cluster Approach with ab-initio parameters

Electron correlation effects in the half-metallic ferromagnet NiMnSb are investigated within a combined density functional and many-body approach. Starting from a realistic multi-orbital Hubbard-model including Mn and Ni-d orbitals, the many-body problem is addressed via the Variational Cluster Approach. The density of states obtained in the calculation shows a strong spectral weight transfer towards the Fermi level in the occupied conducting majority spin channel with respect to the uncorrelated case, as well as states with vanishing quasiparticle weight in the minority spin gap. Although the two features produce competing effects, the overall outcome is a strong reduction of the spin polarisation at the Fermi level with respect to the uncorrelated case. This result emphasizes the importance of correlation in this material.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure