Emerging from rapid advances in digitization and technological capabilities is a new form of information systems development project: cyber projects. Cyber projects are complex, massive, and ambitious, often involving hundreds of academic, government, and industry professionals, requiring years of development, and costing millions of dollars. In our study, we examine how control is exercised in cyber projects. Based on a longitudinal study over eight years, we develop a process theory of the control of cyber projects. Initially we observe that project control is driven by the field, i.e., all of the individual or collective entities that subscribe to the general purpose of the project. This form of control is later replaced by a more bureaucratic form from government-sponsored entities to ensure that traditional project objectives are met. Once construction begins and the field understands the implications and promise of the project, we observe that control is again exerted by the primary project users in the field, complemented by authority-based control exerted by the government-sponsored entisty in the field.
This study draws on distributive justice, human capital, and stigmatization theories to hypothesize relationships between relative pay gap and patterns of job mobility. Our study also expands the criterion space of job mobility by contrasting different job destinations when information technology (IT) professionals make job moves. We examine three job moves: (a) turnover to another IT job in a different firm, (b) turnaway-within to a non-IT job, and (c) turnaway-between to a different firm and a non-IT job. We analyze work histories spanning 28 years for 359 IT professionals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We report three major findings. First, as hypothesized, larger relative pay gaps significantly increase the likelihood of job mobility. Second, IT males and IT females have different job mobility patterns. IT males are more likely to turn over than turn away-between when faced with a relative pay gap. Further, and contrary to predictions from human capital theory, IT males are more likely to turn away-within than turn over. This surprising finding suggests that the ubiquitous use of IT in other business functions may have increased the value of IT skills for non-IT jobs and reduced the friction of moving from IT to other non-IT positions. Third, and consistent with stigmatization arguments, IT females are more likely to turn away from IT than to turn over when faced with a relative pay gap. In fact, to reduce relative pay gaps, IT females tend to take on lower-status jobs that pay less than their IT jobs. We conclude this study with important theoretical, practical, and policy implications.
This study examines the role of project managers' (PM) practical intelligence (PI) in the performance of software offshore outsourcing projects. Based on the extant literature, we conceptualize PI for PMs as their capability to resolve project related work problems, given their long-range and short-range goals; PI is targeted at resolving unexpected and difficult situations, which often cannot be resolved using established processes and frameworks. We then draw on the information processing literature to argue that software offshore outsourcing projects are prone to severe information constraints that lead to unforeseen critical incidents that must be resolved adequately for the projects to succeed. We posit that PMs can use PI to effectively address and resolve such incidents, and therefore the level of PMs' PI positively affects project performance. We further theorize that project complexity and familiarity contribute to its information constraints and the likelihood of critical incidents in a project, thereby moderating the relationship between PMs' PI and project performance.
Open source software (OSS) communities live and die with the continuous contributions of programmers who often participate without direct remuneration. An intriguing question is whether such sustained participation in OSS projects yields economic benefits to the participants. Moreover, as participants engage in OSS projects, they take on different roles and activities in the community. This raises additional questions of whether different forms of participation in OSS communities are associated with different economic rewards and, if so, in which contexts. In this paper, we draw upon theories of signaling and job matching to hypothesize that participants who possess "proof" of their skills in OSS projects are financially rewarded for their activities in the labor market. More specifically, we distinguish between participation in OSS communities that is associated with a signaling value for unobserved productivity characteristics and an additional value that accrues to participants whose OSS roles and activities match those in their paid employment. Following a cohort of OSS programmers over a six-year period, we empirically examine the wages and OSS performance of participants in three of the foremost OSS projects operating within the Apache Software Foundation. Controlling for individual characteristics and other wage-related factors, our findings reveal that credentials earned through a merit-based ranking system are associated with as much as an 18% increase in wages. Moreover, we find that participants who have OSS project management responsibilities receive additional financial rewards if their professional job is in IT management. These findings suggest that rank within an OSS meritocracy is a credible and precise signal of participants' productive capacity and that participants' roles and activities in an OSS community have additional financial value when aligned with their paid employment.
This paper examines the objective career histories, mobility patterns, and career success of 500 individuals drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), who had worked in the information technology workforce. Sequence analysis of career histories shows that careers of the IT workforce are more diverse than the traditional view of a dual IT career path (technical versus managerial). This study reveals a new career typology comprising three broad, distinct paths: IT careers; professional labor market (PLM)careers; and secondary labor market (SLM) careers. Of the 500 individuals in the IT workforce, 173 individuals pursued IT careers while the remaining 327 individuals left IT for other high-status non-IT professional jobs in PLM or lower-status, non-IT jobs in SLM careers. Findings from this study contribute to refining the concept of "boundaryless" careers. By tracing the diverse trajectories of career mobility, we enrich our understanding of how individuals construct boundaryless careers that span not only organizational but also occupational boundaries. Career success did not differ in terms of average pay for individuals in IT and PLM careers. By contrast, individuals in SLM careers attained the lowest pay. We conclude this study with implications for future research and for the management of IT professionals' careers
This study examines why firms fail or survive in the volatile software industry. We provide a novel perspective by considering how software firms' capabilities and their competitive actions affect their ultimate survival. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), we conceptualize capabilities as a firm's ability to efficiently transform input resources into outputs, relative to its peers. We define three critical capabilities of software-producing firms—research and development (RD), marketing (MK), and operations (OP)—and hypothesize that in the dynamic, high-technology software industry, RD and MK capabilities are most important for firm survival. We then draw on the competitive dynamics literature to theorize that competitive actions distinguished by a greater emphasis on innovation-related moves will increase firm survival more than actions emphasizing resource-related moves. Finally, we postulate that firms' capabilities will complement their competitive actions in affecting firm survival. Our empirical evaluation examines a cross-sectional, time series panel of 5,827 observations on 870 software companies from 1995 to 2007. We use a stochastic frontier production function to measure the capability for each software firm in each time period. We then use the Cox proportional hazard regression technique to relate capabilities and competitive actions to software firms' failure rates. Unexpectedly, our results reveal that higher OP capability increases software firm survival more than higher MK and RD capabilities. Further, firms with a greater emphasis on innovation-related than resource-related competitive actions have a greater likelihood of survival, and this likelihood increases even further when these firms have higher MK and OP capabilities. Additional analyses of subsectors within the software industry reveal that firms producing visual applications (e.g., graphical and video game software) have the highest MK capability but the lowest OP and RD capabilities and make twice as many innovation-related as resource-related moves. These firms have the highest market values but the worst Altman Z scores, suggesting that they are valued highly but also are at high risk for failure, and indeed the firms in this sector fail at a greater rate than expected. In contrast, firms producing traditional decision-support applications and infrastructure software have different capabilities and make different competitive moves. Our findings suggest that the firms that persist and survive over the long term in the dynamic software industry are able to capitalize on their competitive actions because of their greater capabilities, and particularly OP capabilities.
Process virtualization occurs when a process that relies upon physical interaction between people and/or objects is transitioned to a virtual environment. Process virtualization is having profound effects on society, as an increasing number of both business and nonbusiness processes such as those related to education, medicine, and dating are being migrated to virtual environments. There is a vast literature that relates to process virtualization topics, but it is fragmented across different domains. The purpose of this paper is to propose a research agenda to develop high-level theories and frameworks that inform the general process virtualization phenomenon. Developing these theories and frameworks will synthesize existing knowledge and provide a theoretical foundation upon which to add new knowledge as it is created. This will help policy makers maximize the substantial benefits of virtual processes while minimizing the risks. Given the background, interests, and skills of IS scholars, the IS discipline is well suited to lead in this endeavor.
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.
Coordination is important in software development because it leads to benefits such as cost savings, shorter development cycles, and better-integrated products. Team cognition research suggests that members coordinate through team knowledge, but this perspective has only been investigated in real-time collocated tasks and we know little about which types of team knowledge best help coordination in the most geographically distributed software work. In this field study, we investigate the coordination needs of software teams, how team knowledge affects coordination, and how this effect is influenced by geographic dispersion. Our findings show that software teams have three distinct types of coordination needs--technical, temporal, and process--and that these needs vary with the members' role; geographic distance has a negative effect on coordination, but is mitigated by shared knowledge of the team and presence awareness; and shared task knowledge is more important for coordination among collocated members. We articulate propositions for future research in this area based on our analysis.
Because of challenges often experienced when deploying software, many firms have embarked on software process improvement (SPI) initiatives. Critical to the success of these initiatives is the transfer of knowledge across individuals who occupy a range of roles in various organizational units involved in software production. Prior research suggests that a portfolio of different mechanisms, employed frequently, can be required for effective knowledge transfer. However, little research exists that examines under what situations differing portfolios of mechanisms are selected. Further, it is not clear how effective different portfolio designs are. In this study, we conceptualize knowledge transfer portfolios in terms of their composition (the types of mechanisms used) and their intensity (the frequency with which the mechanisms are utilized). We hypothesize the influence of organizational design decisions on the composition and intensity of knowledge transfer portfolios for SPI. We then posit how the composition and intensity of knowledge transfer portfolios affect performance improvement. Our findings indicate that a more intense portfolio of knowledge transfer mechanisms is used when the source and recipient are proximate, when they are in a hierarchical relationship, or when they work in different units. Further, a source and recipient select direction-based portfolios when they are farther apart, in a hierarchical relationship, or work in different units. In terms of performance, our results reveal that the fit between the composition and intensity of the knowledge transfer portfolio influences the recipient's performance improvement. At lower levels of intensity direction-based portfolios are more effective, while at higher levels of intensity routine-based portfolios yield the highest performance improvement. We discuss the implications of our findings for researchers and for managers who want to promote knowledge transfer to improve software processes in their organizations.
Although increasing evidence suggests that superior performance requires alignment between firms' strategies and production processes, it is not known if such alignment is relevant for software development processes. This study breaks new ground by examining how firms align their software processes, products, and strategies in Internet application development. Drawing upon the literatures in strategy, operations management, and information systems, we identify four dimensions that influence alignment: the business unit strategy, the level of product customization, the level of process customization, and the volume of customers. To examine how these dimensions are synchronized, we conducted detailed case studies of Internet application development in nine varied firms including both start-ups and established "brick and mortar" companies. Our analyses reveal that the firms in our study do use differing processes for Internet application development, and that many of the firms match their software process choices to product characteristics, customer volume, and business unit strategies. We develop concept maps for the firms that are in alignment to illustrate how managers configure specific product and process dimensions. We also offer potential explanations for why some firms are misaligned, such as attempting to execute incompatible strategies, the lack of coordination between marketing and production strategies, the too rapid expansion of process scope, and inflexible barriers to rapid adaptation of process. Our study contributes detailed insights into how software processes and customized to complement different types of product requirements and strategies.
Organizations have significantly increased their use of contracting in information systems (IS), hiring contractors to work with permanent professionals, Based on theories of social exchange and social comparison, we hypothesize differences in work attitudes, behaviors, and performance across the two groups, and evaluate our hypotheses with a sequential mixed-methods design. Our first study surveys contract and permanent professionals on software development teams in a large transportation company. Our second study involves in-depth interviews With contract and permanent IS professionals in three organizations. We find support for many of our hypotheses but also Some Surprising results. Contrary to our predictions, contractors perceive a more favorable work environment than permanent professionals but exhibit lower in-role and extra-role behaviors than their permanent counterparts. Supervisors perceive their contract subordinates as lower-performing and less loyal, obedient, and trustworthy, in-depth interviews help to explain these findings. Job design emerges as an important factor influencing contractors' work attitudes, behaviors, and performance. Supervisors restrict the scope of contractors' jobs, limiting their job behaviors and performance. To compensate, permanent professionals are assigned considerably enlarged job scopes, leading to their lower perceptions of the work environment. We propose a theoretical model that embraces job design in explaining differences in work outcomes for contract Versus permanent professionals on software development teams. The results from our study imply that organizations should carefully design and balance the jobs of their contractors and permanent employees to improve attitudes, behaviors, and workplace performance.
The cost of enhancing software applications to accommodate new and evolving user requirements is significant. Many enhancement cost-reduction initiatives have focused on increasing software structure in applications. However, while software structure can decrease enhancement effort by localizing data processing, increased effort is also required to comprehend structure. Thus, it is not clear whether high levels of software structure are economically efficient in all situations. In this study, we develop a model of the relationship between software structure and software enhancement costs and errors. We introduce the notion of software structure as a moderator of the relationship between software volatility, total data complexity, and software enhancement outcomes. We posit that it is efficient to more highly structure the more volatile applications, because increased familiarity with the application structure through frequent enhancement enables localization of maintenance effort. For more complex applications, software structure is more beneficial than for less complex applications because it facilitates the comprehension process where it is most needed. Given the downstream enhancement benefits of structure for more volatile and complex applications, we expect that the optimal level of structure is higher for these applications. We empirically evaluate our model using data collected on the business applications of a major mass merchandiser and a large commercial bank. We find that structure moderates the relationship between complexity, volatility, and enhancement outcomes, such that higher levels of structure are more advantageous for the more complex and more volatile applications in terms of reduced enhancement costs and errors. We also find that more structure is designed in for volatile applications and for applications with higher levels of complexity. Finally, we identify application type as a significant factor in predicting which applications are more volatile and more complex at our research sites. That is, applications with induction-based algorithms such as those that support planning, forecasting, and management decision-making activities are more complex and more volatile than applications with rule-based algorithms that support operational and transaction-processing activities. Our results indicate that high investment in software quality practices such as structured design is not economically efficient in all situations. Our findings also suggest the importance of organizational mechanisms in promoting efficient design choices that lead to reduced enhancement costs and errors.