BI and CRM for Customer Involvement in Product and Service Development

Customer involvement in product and service development (CIPS) is recognized as important for firms; yet the role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating CIPS is understudied. We examine two enterprise technologies which improve knowledge available to decision makers: Business Intelligence (BI) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While CRM provides transactional information and knowledge about customers, BI provides market-sensing and analytics capabilities to leverage customer knowledge. Drawing on this theoretical basis, we posit that BI and CRM, individually and in combination, facilitate CIPS. Our large-sample empirical analysis of U.S. firms broadly supports our propositions. In supplementary analysis, we find that CIPS is associated with higher likelihood of benefits from customer-management systems in terms of development of new or improved products/services resulting from customer feedback. This suggests that customers can be effective contributors to innovation-related value from IT. Our study contributes by showing the role of BI and CRM in CIPS

Business Value of IT-Enabled Call Centers: An Empirical Analysis

Corporate information technology (IT) investments in customer support and service such as CRM systems have been on a steady rise. Of late, the primary interest has shifted toward assessment of returns on these invest- ments. This research attempts to assess the value of IT investments in a customer support setting using a process-level analysis. Given the lack of academic IS research in the area of customer support and value of IT in the service context, this study aims to bridge this gap by building on prior business value of IT literature. In order to identify the contribution of IT in the context of our study, we explicitly control for personnel-specific factors and customer-specific factors. Our findings indicate that IT enabled call centers significantly improve the performance of the customer support process. Further, we also find that the benefits from IT enabled call centers may be higher when the customer-reported problems are complex and difficult to resolve. In addition, we find that both personnel-specific factors and customer-specific factors significantly influence the business benefits from IT in call center and customer support applications

Leveraging IT for Business Innovation: Does the Role of the CIO Matter?

The evolving role of Information Technology (IT) in business innovation places increasing emphasis on the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Yet, the role of the CIO in business innovation is understudied in the extant literature. Drawing on organizational theory of boundary spanning leadership, we posit that the CIO’s cross-functional role pertaining to entities and functions outside the IT organization help explain the firm’s propensity for IT-enabled business innovation. Our large-sample empirical analysis of U.S. firms largely supports our theoretical propositions. We empirically find that IT-enabled business innovation is more likely when the CIO reports to the Chief Executive Officer, has more interactions with the firm’s customers and is more involved in new product development. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of the CIO in IT-enabled business innovation and provides implications for practice

Determinants of Inspection Effectiveness in Software Development: An Empirical Analysis

Software inspections are formal evaluations of the intermediate work products (artifacts) of the development process. These artifacts are examined to ensure that a high quality work-product is delivered to the testers and ultimately to the end-users of the software product. The crucial role of inspections in determining quality of the software makes it important to assess the effectiveness of inspections. While prior research has identified several factors that influence effectiveness of software inspections, our understanding of the influence of team composition (personnel mix and team size) and the type of the inspected artifact (project plan, requirements specification, design document, code) on effectiveness of inspections is minimal. We develop hypotheses for the factors affecting inspection effectiveness and attempt to validate these hypotheses in a field setting. Our preliminary results show that, during early stages of software development, an increase in the proportion of experienced reviewers (with greater domain experience) is associated with both an increase in the total number of defects discovered in the inspection process as well as an increase in the likelihood of detecting high severity defects. However, during later stages, we find that greater pro- gramming experience is associated with both an increase in the total number of defects discovered in the inspection process as well as an increase in the likelihood of detecting high severity defects. These results have important implications for both practice and research

Benefits of CMM-Based Process Improvements for Support Activities: An Empirical Study

Software process improvement historically focused on cost savings accrued in software engineering. However, the effect of process improvement on support activities is not well understood. This study examines the relationship between process maturity measured by the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model and savings in non-engineering support activities such as configuration management, data processing operations, senior management, and quality assurance

Antecedents of Onshore and Offshore Business Process Outsourcing

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for adoption of onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) by firms. Our analysis of data from 244 firms publicly traded in the United States indicates that firms with a stronger information technology infrastructure and business process knowledge are more likely to engage in onshore and offshore BPO. We also find a positive association between offshore BPO and cost-cutting business strategy, and between offshore BPO and IT department focus on innovation. This study makes three contributions. First, we integrate multiple streams of literature (transaction cost economics and capabilities) to create a theoretical framework to understand the drivers of BPO. This theoret- ical framework extends the emerging literature on BPO. Second, we establish a link between IT infrastructure and BPO, using contributions from the information systems literature on IT outsourcing and business process management. Third, we distinguish between onshore and offshore BPO, including contributions from the inter- national business literature on internationalization, to identify any differences between onshore and offshore BPO

The Life Cycle Effects of Software Process Improvement: A Longitudinal Study

Rapid innovation, intense competition, and the drive to survive have compelled information technology (IT) firms to seek ways to develop high quality software quickly and productively. The critical issues faced by these firms are the inter-relationships, sometimes viewed as trade-offs, between quality, cycle time, and effort in the software development life cycle. Some believe that higher quality can only be achieved with increased development time and effort. Others argue that higher quality results in less rework, with shorter development cycles and reduced effort. In this study, we investigate the inter-relationships between software process improvement, quality, cycle time, and effort. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the effect of software process improvement and software quality on all activities in the software development life cycle. We find that software process improvement leads to higher quality and that process improvement and quality are associated with reduced cycle time, development effort, and supporting activity effort (e.g., configuration management, quality assurance). We are in the process of examining the effect of process improvement and quality on post-deployment maintenance activities

The Consumer Online Purchase Decision: A Model of Consideration Set Formation and Buyer Conversion Rate Across Market Leaders and Market Followers

The impact of low search costs in Internet markets has received a great deal of attention in the academic literature and in the press. While many have argued that the presence of low search costs will lead to strong price competition and vanishing margins, the empirical evidence is decidedly mixed. Reflecting this uncertainty, firms have taken radically different strategies with regard to facilitating search across sites. Some firms have actively blocked or attempted to limit price search (e.g., by refusing to be listed at shopbots) while others have actively encouraged price search. In this research we use a unique dataset of detailed customer survey data to analyze the impact of consumer search behavior on the formation of consideration sets and the consumer’s ultimate purchase decision. We find that while searching across market leaders is not detrimental for market followers, searching across market followers is somewhat detrimental for market leaders. These results suggest that today’s market leaders may be at risk from increased consumer adoption of broad search technologies such as Internet shopbots

Learning in a Disruptive Customer Engagement Platform: An Empirical Analysis in the Banking Industry

The shift in enterprise applications to disruptive mobile platforms calls for research to better understand the mechanisms and factors behind success in these new platforms. In this paper, we empirically study the learning dynamics of sales officers and factors associated with business value, measured as account- opening efficiency in a tablet-based banking application at a large private bank in an emerging market. Our model allows us to study individual learning patterns, and our results show that although high performers in the traditional systems continue to maintain their edge in the new mobile platform, the gap between high and low performers is reduced significantly over time. Our results also reveal that customers’ awareness of the tablet banking service, their digital literacy, and external environmental factors such as mobile infrastructure and market maturity can affect sales officers’ account-opening performance in the tablet-based system.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133524/1/1331_Huang.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133524/4/1331_Huang.pdfDescription of 1331_Huang.pdf : fixed July 2016 revisio