The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Kieran Conboy on the concept of agility in information systems development, one by Richard Vidgen and Xiaofeng Wang on the enablers and inhibitors of agility, and one by Likoebe M. Maruping, Viswanath Venkatesh, and Ritu Agarwal on the effectiveness of agility methods.
This paper investigates two-stage offshoring as experienced by the Irish sites of two large global companies, headquartered in the United States, with significant software development operations. As part of these companies, the Irish sites act as a bridge in their offshoring arrangements: While the U.S. sites offshore work to Ireland, the Irish sites offshore work further to India and, hence, have experience of being both customer and vendor in two-stage offshore sourcing relationships. Using a framework derived from relational exchange theory (RET), we conducted multiple case study research to investigate and develop an initial theoretical model of the implementation of this two-stage offshoring bridge model. Our study shows that while both companies act as bridges in two-stage offshoring arrangements, their approaches differ in relation to (1) team integration, (2) organizational level implementation, and (3) site hierarchy. Although, there are opportunities afforded by the bridge model at present, the extent to which these opportunities will be viable into the future is open to question. As revealed in our study, temporal location seems to favor a bridge location such as Ireland, certainly with United States--Asian partners. However, location alone will not be enough to maintain position in future two-stage offshoring arrangements. Furthermore, our research supports the view that offshoring tends to progress through a staged sequence of progressively lower cost destinations. Such a development suggests that two-stage offshoring, as described in this paper, will eventually become what we would term multistage offshoring.
This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy--opensourcing, as we term it here--whereby commercial companies and open source communities collaborate on development of software of commercial interest to the company. Building on previous research on information systems outsourcing, a theoretical framework for exploring the opensourcing phenomenon is derived. The first phase of the research concerned qualitative case studies involving three commercial organizations (IONA Technologies, Philips Medical Systems, and Telefonica) that had "liberated" what had hitherto been proprietary software and sought to grow a global open source community around their product. We followed this with a large-scale survey involving additional exemplars of the phenomenon. The study identifies a number of symmetrical and complementary customer and community obligations that are associated with opensourcing success. We also identify a number of tension points on which customer and community perceptions tend to vary. Overall the key watchwords for opensourcing are openness, trust, tact, professionalism, transparency, and complementariness: The customer and community need to establish a trusted partnership of shared responsibility in building an overall opensourcing ecosystem. The study reveals an ongoing shift from OSS as a community of individual developers to OSS as a community of commercial organizations, primarily small to medium-sized enterprises. It also reveals that opensourcing provides ample opportunity for companies to headhunt top developers, hence moving from outsourcing to a largely unknown OSS workforce toward recruitment of developers from a global open source community whose talents have become known as a result of the opensourcing experience.