Kai Spohrer

A Blockchain Research Framework

While blockchain technology is commonly considered potentially disruptive in various regards, there is a lack of understanding where and how blockchain technology is effectively applicable and where it has mentionable practical effects. This issue has given rise to critical voices that judge the technology as over-hyped. Against this backdrop, this study adapts an established research framework to structure the insights of the current body of research on blockchain technology, outline the present research scope as well as disregarded topics, and sketch out multidisciplinary research approaches. The framework differentiates three groups of activities (design and features, measurement and value, management and organization) at four levels of analysis (users and society, intermediaries, platforms, firms and industry). The review shows that research has predominantly focused on technological questions of design and features, while neglecting application, value creation, and governance. In order to foster substantial blockchain research that addresses meaningful questions, this study identifies several avenues for future studies. Given the breadth of open questions, it shows where research can benefit from multidisciplinary collaborations and presents data sources as starting points for empirical investigations.

A Coordination Framework for Pervasive Applications in Multi-user Environments

Pervasive applications have been designed to support users in their everyday life. For this purpose, they are able to interact with their physical environment, their context. They are aware of their context and use this information for configuration decisions. Furthermore, they can actively modify the context to meet their user’s needs. This leads to new challenges in multi-user environments as applications which are executed simultaneously share a common context and thus can directly impact each other. In this paper we present a framework to coordinate multiple pervasive applications explicitly considering their context-interactivity. We show how application coordination can be integrated in an existing component-based system exemplified by our system PCOM. We conduct measurements for the extended system and discuss the obtained results.

Should This Software Component Be Developed Inside or Outside Our Firm? - A Design Science Perspective on the Sourcing of Application Systems

From a national and global perspective, the sourcing of application systems has significantly matured and been widely adopted over the past years. However, little research has been conducted regarding the properties and contingencies of outsourced technological artifacts. In most scholarly published contributions, it is often difficult to find the IT artifact in the IS sourcing debate. Especially, it has not yet been explored on which rationales certain parts of an IS architecture are handed over to external vendors or kept in-house. In order to overcome this drawback, we focus in this paper on the outsourcing decision for components of IS architectures. This, in turn, directs the focus to the properties of software components and their surrounding contingency factors which may facilitate the decision to outsource a component or not. Thus, the unit of analysis will not be on an organizational or work group level, but rather on the level of a technological artifact itself: the software component which needs to be developed among others in order to achieve the desired system functionality. We are not aware of any research contributions in IS sourcing which have been conducted on a software component level so far. Thus, we aim to contribute towards an underexplored topic which is highly important since organizational decisions towards outsourcing are deeply rooted in the technical functionalities of the desired systems.

Antecedents of ISD Offshoring Outcomes: Exploring Differences between India and China

Prior research in IS offshoring has highlighted issues in software development projects arising from differences in culture, from status differences and resource inequalities, as well as from asset-related characteristics. Based on Practice Theory and Transaction Cost Economics, we integrate these three perspectives into a single research model explaining the relation between the outcome of offshore ISD projects and cultural, social, and asset-related characteristics of the projects. We substantiate our model with a multiple-case study in two settings in which German companies have offshored ISD projects to India and China. Thereby, we also address a severe drawback of contemporary intercultural IS offshoring research: the neglect of China as the most rapidly growing IS offshoring location at present.

Coordination challenges in large-scale software development : a case study of planning misalignment in hybrid settings

Achieving effective inter-team coordination is one of the most pressing challenges in large-scale software development. Hybrid approaches of traditional and agile development promise combining the overview and predictability of long-term planning on an inter-team level with the flexibility and adaptability of agile development on a team level. It is currently unclear, however, why such hybrids often fail. Our case study within a large software development unit of 13 teams at a global enterprise software company explores how and why a combination of traditional planning on an inter-team level and agile development on a team level can result in ineffective coordination. Based on a variety of data, including interviews with scrum masters, product owners, architects and senior management, and using Grounded Theory data analysis procedures, we identify a lack of dependency awareness across development teams as a key explanation of ineffective coordination. Our findings show how a lack of dependency awareness emerges from misaligned planning activities of specification, prioritization, estimation and allocation between agile team and traditional inter-team levels and ultimately prevents effective coordination. Knowing about these issues, large-scale hybrid projects in similar contexts can try to better align their planning activities across levels to improve dependency awareness and in turn achieve more effective coordination.

Global Sourcing of Information Systems Development - Explaining Project Outcomes Based on Social, Cultural, and Asset-Related Characteristics

Based on Practice Theory and Transaction Cost Economics, we integrate three perspectives of prior research: we explain the relation between the outcome of offshore ISD projects and cultural, social, as well as asset-related project characteristics. We substantiate and refine our model with a multiple-case study of eight projects in which German companies offshored ISD tasks to China, India, Eastern, and Central Europe. We find that the project outcome is heavily dependent on the relationship quality of the partners which in turn depends heavily on habitus differences and the social distance between them. Two management practices, namely boundary spanning and offshore partner empowerment, can reduce the negative impacts of these factors. Moreover, we find that the required transfer of client-specific knowledge can have negative effects on the project outcome. However, the observed effects do not match the traditional explanation given by Transaction Cost Economics. Instead, the explanation of Practice Theory fits the data: the specific knowledge is embedded in a socio-cultural field of struggle and constitutes a valuable resource.

Inter-Team Coordination in Large Agile Software Development Settings: Five Ways of Practicing Agile at Scale

Scaling agile software development to settings with multiple interconnected teams requires inter-team coordination. We present a multiple case study at one of the worlds largest enterprise software vendors, SAP SE, where we analyzed five ways of practicing agile at scale. We illustrate case by case the coordination mechanisms and practices the individual development programs applied to cope with the challenges of scaled agile software development.

Discussion of Findings

So far, results from three distinct but interconnected research phases of this study have been presented. This chapter briefly reiterates the purpose of this study and integrates the distinct phases’ findings into one coherent picture with regard to the relations between team cognition and the application of collaborative quality assurance techniques in ISD teams. Subsequently, contributions to theory and managerial implications of this study are discussed in the light of prior and possibilities for future research. This chapter concludes by pointing out the limitations of this study.

Collaborative Quality Assurance in Information Systems Development

Introduction.- Theoretical Foundations.- Research Design.- Findings.- Discussion of Findings.- Conclusion.