IT-Enabled Knowledge Creation for Open Innovation

Open innovation is increasingly important for researchers and practitioners alike. Open innovation is closely linked to knowledge creation in that, with open innovation, knowledge inflows and outflows are exploited for innovation. In the information systems field, open innovation has been closely linked to open source software development teams. However, the literature has not yet identified how open source software development teams use information technologies to create knowledge to bring about open innovation. This study fills in this gap by asking the following research questions: RQ1) How do innovative open source software development teams create knowledge?, and RQ2) What types of information technologies do innovative open source software development teams rely on for enabling knowledge creation? I answer these research questions with a revelatory case study. The findings contribute to the knowledge management theory by identifying how three of the four knowledge creation modes identified by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) manifest through different behaviors in the IT-enabled open innovation setting compared to behaviors observed in the organizational setting. The findings also contribute to information systems theory by identifying the role of information technologies in enabling knowledge creation for open innovation. This study further provides researchers and practitioners with ways of identifying knowledge creation by analyzing information technology artifacts, such as mailing lists, issue trackers, and software versioning tools

Leadership in a Non-Traditional Setting: Self-Managing Virtual IS Development Teams

Despite its abundance, traditional leadership research cannot be claimed to transfer directly to the leadership context of self-managing virtual (SMV) Information Systems Development teams. Unique conditions of these novel team environments require focused studies of leadership in virtual team settings. Although there are some studies of virtual team leadership that make important contributions to the literature, these studies typically use short term, ad-hoc teams of students. This study ultimately aims at filling the gap in the literature by investigating how leadership manifests in real-life SMV IS teams over time. In this paper, the overall study is introduced and the initial findings based on the content analysis schema development effort are reported

Identifying the Critical Success Factors for Low Customized ERP System Implementations in SMEs

So far the level of ERP system customization has not been taken into account when identifying critical success factors for ERP implementations in small to medium size enterprises (SMEs). This research empirically tests the influence of the level of system customization on success factors by surveying 216 SMEs. We find that motivation system and project team empowerment are more important in low customized ERP implementations. This study is relevant to both theory and practice as it identifies and analyzes factors contributing to a higher success rate in low customized ERP system implementations in SMEs

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

Roles and politeness behavior in community-based free/libre open source software development

Community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development relies on contributions from both core and peripheral members. Prior research on core-periphery has focused on software coding related behaviors. We study how core-periphery roles are related to social-relational behavior in terms of politeness behavior. Data from two FLOSS projects suggest that both core and peripheral members use more positive politeness strategies than negative strategies. Further, core and peripheral members use different strategies to protect positive face in positive politeness, which we term respect and intimacy, respectively. Our results contribute to FLOSS research and politeness theory. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Stakeholders' enactment of competing logics in IT governance:polarization, compromise or synthesis?

Governing IT while incorporating stakeholders with diverse institutional backgrounds remains a challenge. Stakeholder groups are typically socialized differently, and may have different perspectives on IT governance dilemmas. Yet, extant literature offers only limited insight on socialized views on IT-governance. This study uses an institutional logics lens to examine how competing institutional logics get connected in IT governance practices through dominant stakeholders’ enactment patterns, and how these enactment patterns may affect the organization’s IT performance. We find that logics were coupled to the three dominant stakeholder groups, but only loosely so. Congruence between the three logics they enacted depended on the IT governance dilemma at hand. Our findings demonstrate how within a triad of competing logics, switching rivalry among hybrid logics may develop. Here, the enactments led to two hybrid logics, none of which became dominant. Remarkably, the IT-professionalism logic accommodated polarization between medical professionalism and the managerial logic, causing unstable IT governance. We propose that IT professionalism offers room for agency and is crucial in determining the resulting enactment patterns: polarizing, compromising or even synthesizing. This study may raise managers’ awareness of the competing logics underlying IT-governance practices and clarify the pivotal role of IT professionalism in IT governance debates