PurposeThis research examines how platform development organizations address tensions arising from the separation of platform and product development teams. Specifically, we explore how these organizations blend structural and contextual ambidexterity, by using boundary spanning to achieve a form of hybrid ambidexterity.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted a multi-site field study of three platform-based software development organizations, chosen through theoretical sampling. We collected qualitative data through interviews of stakeholders at various organizational levels, including project managers, developers, CIOs, architects and directors, as well as through observations of workshop activities. Data collection and analysis activities were intertwined.FindingsWe found three boundary-spanning practices at the micro-foundational level that enabled organizations to achieve hybrid ambidexterity in a platform-based software development environment. Our balancing practices provide concrete guidance on how to regulate participant behavior, striking a balance between setting necessary boundaries and allowing sufficient generativity.Originality/valueOur findings reveal how teams, through their boundary-spanning practices, engender fluidity in boundary objects to enhance the understanding of root causes of tensions and resolve them. Unlike prior research, which has examined this phenomenon at higher organizational levels, our study sheds light on how, at the micro-foundational individual and team levels, team members span boundaries and achieve a balance in platform control and flexibility.

To manage the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation, customer service organizations typically choose a specific ambidexterity mode, such as structural separation or behavioral integration, that suits their context. However, recent research suggests that organizations need to dynamically change their ambidexterity modes to better align with changing environmental and organizational contexts. This study examines the impact of AI in facilitating the shift across various modes of ambidexterity in customer service organizations. Our findings reveal that achieving shifts in ambidexterity modes is challenging, and organizations must overcome technology, business process, and stakeholder related barriers. Based on our findings, we develop a set of propositions for further investigation. Our study contributes to research on the dynamic perspective of ambidexterity by shedding light on how customer service organizations shift from one ambidexterity mode to another and by articulating the important roles played by AI in achieving such shifts.

Innovation in the public sector plays an important role in improving the quality of public services and addressing economic and societal challenges. Most of the previous research on innovations has focused on the private sector. How organizations may achieve ambidexterity for innovations in the public sector characterized by unique constraints has been largely underexplored. Platforms have emerged as key components in organizations’ approaches to innovation. Using an empirical study in a public sector organization, this study identifies a platform-based approach that can be used to achieve ambidexterity in balancing exploitative and exploratory innovations in the public sector. Organizations facing constraints pertaining to structure, risk, and value may benefit from considering their product/service development, process management, and value formulation through this approach. This study also identifies practices in platform development, appropriation, and control that contributed to the success of the platform-based approach.

How is information technology (IT) governance adapted when an organization transitions from an in-house to an outsourced IT function? Based on a case study of a very large, complex outsourcing engagement of an organization's IT function on a global scale, we develop recommendations to guide others in effectively managing this transition.

Although systems development research is at the core of the Information Systems discipline, some scholars call attention to a teaching and research gap in this area of IS. In this study, we examine the state of systems development research in IS by analyzing the articles published in three leading journals between 2000 and 2004. We propose a classification framework based on the type of research paradigm (design vs. explanatory) and the nature of the IT-artifact (conceptualization vs. instantiation). Our results show that about 20% of the articles published in this five year period are focused on systems development. In two of the three journals, there are comparable proportions of studies in the design research and in the explanatory paradigm. However, in all three publications most of the articles are focused on conceptual IT-artifacts, as opposed to instantiations. These findings are important for system development researchers when they choose journals to which to send their papers.

Agile methods have been widely adopted around the world – particularly in the Eastern world, where cultural scripts differ from that of the West from where agile methods originated. However, there is a lack of understanding of the interplay between the basic tenets of agile methods and the Eastern cultures. This understanding is crucial for the effective use of the methods in these cultures. To examine how Eastern cultural phenomena interplay with agile methods, we followed an emic approach in a multisite case study. We examined the adaptation of agile practices in organizations in China, India, and South Korea. We developed a framework describing how Eastern cultural scripts often express the collectivist response to cultural theoretical concepts and how the cultural response interacts in complementary and conflicting ways with agile methods. To explore how conflicts are mitigated, we examined the ways organizations develop ambidextrous practices.

We synthesize a new longitudinal framework for investing in IT assets to support sustainability and to prescribe specific investments for each stage of sustainability. This framework provides an IT investment plan for organizations that supports the five stages of sustainability and will positively moderate the relationship between an organization’s ability to traverse the stages of sustainability and organizational innovation. We propose that there is an innovation payoff at each stage and support that proposition with exemplars from the literature. To highlight their key role in supporting sustainability driven innovation, we choose to call these IT investments Sustainability Innovation Systems (SIS).

Requirements Engineering (RE) faces considerable challenges that are often related to boundaries between various stakeholders involved in the software development process. These challenges may be addressed by boundary spanning practices. We examine how boundary spanning can be adapted to address RE challenges in Product Family Development (PFD), a context that involves complex RE. We study two different development approaches, namely, conventional and agile PFD, because these present considerably different challenges. Our findings from a multisite case study present boundary spanning as a solution to improve the quality of RE processes and highlight interesting differences in how boundary spanner roles and boundary objects are adapted in conventional and agile PFD.

Research problem: Collaborative writing has dramatically changed with the use of cloud-based tools, such as Google Docs. System quality-both functional (i.e., what services the system provides) and nonfunctional quality (i.e., how well the system provides the services)-influences user satisfaction with these tools. Research question: Do functional and nonfunctional quality influence user satisfaction in cloud-based systems that support collaborative writing? Literature review: The intersection of literature from collaborative writing and system quality presents the theoretical foundation for this study. The literature on collaborative writing suggests that technology facilitates and constrains collaborative writing, while the literature on cloud computing highlights the challenges in ensuring various aspects of quality. Furthermore, literature on system quality emphasizes the importance of the different facets of quality (i.e., functional and nonfunctional) and their impacts on user satisfaction. Methodology: We conducted a survey of 150 undergraduate students enrolled in an information systems course at a large urban university. Results: The results show that functional and nonfunctional quality play a critical role in shaping user satisfaction with cloud computing and that nonfunctional quality has a stronger impact than functional quality. Implications: To ensure satisfaction with cloud computing, organizations need to provide adequate development and maintenance resources to ensure both types of quality, and they need to recognize that nonfunctional quality plays a key role in shaping user satisfaction with cloud computing.

Agile software development that provides software development organizations, the ability to respond to changes in turbulent business environments, has been gaining wide adoption. Agile software development projects are characterized by ‘just enough’ planning and lack of upfront commitment to scope, cost, and schedule. These characteristics pose conflicting demands on managers responsible for making funding decisions, because traditional approaches to funding IT projects are often based on well-defined scope, cost, and schedule. These conflicts demand the adaptation of traditional funding processes to suit to agile projects. We draw from Adaptive Structuration Theory to understand the nature of conflicts between traditional IT project funding processes and the dynamic nature of agile projects, and how these conflicts are addressed by practices that are appropriated in the process of social interaction between funding decision makers and development teams. On the basis of a multisite case study, we present a framework that explains how organizations adapt traditional IT funding approaches to accommodate the unique characteristics of agile IT projects.

Green IT has gained significant attention, but specific guidance on how to implement and manage various green IT initiatives is largely underdeveloped. A new framework helps by classifying green IT used in organizations as sustaining or disrupting innovations.

We propose a market based design for trading component-based software products bundled with reuse licenses that allows clients to customize software solutions onsite by reusing and reintegrating components across software systems using their own software development platforms. Using economic experiments in the laboratory with IT professionals we find that introducing reuse licenses has social welfare benefits in terms of both higher seller and higher buyer surplus as well as generating higher product variety in the market. We argue that as software development is increasingly using modularized and component-based approaches software vendor strategies based on flexible licenses permitting the reuse of software offer a viable and sustainable alternative to the traditional software business model build on monolithic user licenses.

Distributed software development has become a common reality with the advent of off-shore development and the need to be close to markets. Also, the dynamic nature of the environment in which businesses operate suggests the use of agile development methods. Whereas distributed software development requires the use of formal processes advocated by plan-driven approaches, rapidly changing environments are appropriate candidates for the use of agile development methods. This tension in agile distributed development poses conflicting demands between alignment and adaptability in the software development process. We conducted a multisite case study of three projects that use agile distributed development to examine how these organizations developed contextual ambidexterity---the ability to pursue conflicting demands simultaneously. Our findings, presented as a conceptual framework, indicate that conflicting demands between alignment and adaptability posed by agile distributed development can be addressed by a set of balanced practices that shape performance management and social context---two important antecedents of contextual ambidexterity.

Can enterprises use Web 2.0 technologies to improve the output of knowledge workers? A study of four knowledge-intensive firms offers insight into their use of social networking for knowledge management and the challenges it presents.

K nowledge management systems help create, store, retrieve, transfer, and apply knowledge. They can also enable collaboration and communication among knowledge workers within and across various domains.1 Traditionally, such systems have helped document explicit knowledge— that is, knowledge that’s easily codified and articulated, such as what you’d see in a user manual.2 However, organizations are starting to include social networking features in their knowledge management infrastructure to capture tacit, social, and individual knowledge as well. Tacit knowledge is difficult to codify because it’s “rooted in action, experience, and involvement in a specific context.”2 An example might be knowing how to deal with a particular customer. Social knowledge is created by group actions and includes social norms for these interactions, and individual knowledge comes from an individual gaining insight after completing a project. Research shows that employees who frequently interact transfer knowledge more effectively,3 supporting the notion that community networking is an important part of knowledge management—especially for tacit knowledge.4 Integrating social networking into knowledge management systems can increase interactions between employees, which can in turn increase their level of trust and encourage more effective collaboration and communication. Many organizations are thus incorporating tools such as Microsoft SharePoint (see the related sidebar) into their knowledge management infrastructure to set up websites accessible through intranets or the Internet and to help employees create, store, and retrieve documents in various formats. To gain insight into this use of social networking for knowledge management and the challenges it presents, we interviewed professionals from four different knowledge-intensive firms in the legal, pharmaceutical, insurance, and software development industries. Social Networking in Knowledge Management

By expanding the balanced scorecard to incorporate sυstainability perspectives, the authors analyze current green IT initiatives to explore how IT can contribute to enterprise-wide sustainability performance.

A software product line is a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features, developed from reusable core assets and incorporating variations to derive product variants. This involves identifying commonality and variability in the product family and implementing shared artifacts while preserving the ability to implement required variability. Software development organizations that recognize market opportunities for products that share a significant number of common elements, but that also exhibit variations, can reap significant economic benefits with SPLE. Agile methods emphasize improvisation over conventional development approaches. These methods focus on quick development in an uncertain, ill-understood environment in which requirements rapidly evolve. These methods also view people, rather than formal documentation, as a project's most important element.

Distributed software support has become increasingly common especially due to the rampant globalization of the software development process. Transfer of contextual knowledge across stakeholders involved in such distributed environments is critical to successful product development and support. Timely transfer of appropriate knowledge about issues faced in production environments to support teams and within support teams can result in significant economic benefits. Failure to share contextual knowledge and lack of common understanding significantly impact the quality of support. We draw from the literature on knowledge transfer and adaptive structuration theory to develop a theoretical basis and an approach to knowledge transfer in distributed software support contexts. Based on a multi-site case study, we develop a traceability framework to enhance shared understanding among team members. A qualitative evaluation of the usefulness of our traceability-based approach to knowledge transfer is presented.

Traceability - the ability of developers to describe and follow the life of an artifact throughout the software development life cycle - is an important process that facilitates acquisition and use of process knowledge. While there has been extensive research focusing on the development of traceability solutions, there is a paucity of research that characterizes the tasks that need to be performed in implementing and using traceability. This research addresses this gap by conceptualizing traceability practice in software development as comprising information processing and communication among developers involved in the process. Accordingly, we present the results of two complementary studies focusing on these two aspects of traceability. Based on Study 1, we develop a process model for information processing in traceability. Through Study 2, we identify important contingency factors that impact the mode of communication among developers and customers. We argue that choice of communication media should be dictated by matching particular media characteristics such as synchronicity, reprocessability, and channel capacity to the situation at hand rather than by using aggregated measures such as media richness or social presence. We integrate the findings from our two studies into a process model that prescribes guidelines for traceability practice in software development. Our prescriptions also help traceability tool developers in delivering traceability support that facilitates appropriate information processing and communication capabilities, taking various project characteristics into consideration.