Narayan Ramasubbu

Designing Web Sites for Customer Loyalty Across Business Domains: A Multilevel Analysis

Web sites are important components of Internet strategy for organizations. This paper develops a theoretical model for understanding the effect of Web site design elements on customer loyalty to a Web site. We show the relevance of the business domain of a Web site to gain a contextual understanding of relative importance of Web site design elements. We use a hierarchical linear modeling approach to model multilevel and cross-level interactions that have not been explicitly considered in previous research. By analyzing data on more than 12,000 online customer surveys for 43 Web sites in several business domains, we find that the relative importance of different Web site features (e.g., content, functionality) in affecting customer loyalty to a Web site varies depending on the Web sites domain. For example, we find that the relationship between Web site content and customer loyalty is stronger for information-oriented Web sites than for transaction-oriented Web sites. However, the relationship between functionality and customer loyalty is stronger for transaction-oriented Web sites than for information-oriented Web sites. We also find that government Web sites enjoy greater word-of-mouth effect than commercial Web sites. Finally, transaction-oriented Web sites tend to score higher on mean customer loyalty than do information-oriented Web sites.

Work dispersion, process-based learning, and offshore software development performance

In this paper we develop a learning-mediated model of offshore software project productivity and quality to examine whether widely adopted structured software processes are effective in mitigating the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We explicate how the key process areas of the capability maturity model (CMM) can be utilized as a platform to launch learning routines in offshore software development and thereby explain why some offshore software development process improvement initiatives are more effective than others. We validate our learning-mediated model of offshore software project performance by utilizing data collected from 42 offshore software projects of a large firm that operates at the CMM level-5 process maturity. Our results indicate that investments in structured processes mitigate the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We also find that the effect of software process improvement initiatives is mediated through investments in process-based learning activities. These results imply that investments in structured processes and the corresponding process-based learning activities can be an economically viable way to counter the challenges of work dispersion and improve offshore project performance. We discuss the implication of these results for the adoption of normative process models by offshore software firms.

Design capital and design moves: the logic of digital business strategy

As information technology becomes integral to the products and services in a growing range of industries, there has been a corresponding surge of interest in understanding how firms can effectively formulate and execute digital business strategies. This fusion of IT within the business environment gives rise to a strategic tension between investing in digital artifacts for long-term value creation and exploiting them for short-term value appropriation. Further, relentless innovation and competitive pressures dictate that firms continually adapt these artifacts to changing market and technological conditions, but sustained profitability requires scalable architectures that can serve a large customer base and stable interfaces that support integration across a diverse ecosystem of complementary offerings. The study of digital business strategy needs new concepts and methods to examine how these forces are managed in pursuit of competitive advantage. We conceptualize the logic of digital business strategy in terms of two constructs: design capital (i.e., the cumulative stock of designs owned or controlled by a firm) and design moves (i.e., the discrete strategic actions that enlarge, reduce, or modify a firms stock of designs). We also identify two salient dimensions of design capital, namely, option value and technical debt. Using embedded case studies of four firms, we develop a rich conceptual model and testable propositions to lay out a design-based logic of digital business strategy. This logic highlights the interplay between design moves and design capital in the context of digital business strategy and contributes to a growing body of insights that link the design of digital artifacts to competitive strategy and firm-level performance.

High tech, high touch: The effect of employee skills and customer heterogeneity on customer satisfaction with enterprise system support services

Although firms have invested significant resources in implementing enterprise software systems (ESS) to modernize and integrate their business process infrastructure, customer satisfaction with ESS has remained an understudied phenomenon. In this exploratory research study, we investigate customer satisfaction for support services of ESS and focus on employee skills and customer heterogeneity. We analyze archival customer satisfaction data from 170 real-world customer service encounters of a leading ESS vendor. Our analysis indicates that the technical and behavioral skills of customer support representatives play a major role in influencing overall customer satisfaction with ESS support services. We find that the effect of technical skills on customer satisfaction is moderated by behavioral skills. We also find that the technical skills of the support personnel are valued more by repeat customers than by new customers. We discuss the implications of these findings for managing customer heterogeneity in ESS support services and for the allocation and training of ESS support personnel.

Overcoming the challenges in cost estimation for distributed software projects

We describe how we studied, in-situ, the operational processes of three large high process maturity distributed software development companies and discovered three common problems they faced with respect to early stage project cost estimation. We found that project managers faced significant challenges to accurately estimate project costs because the standard metrics-based estimation tools they used (a) did not effectively incorporate diverse distributed project configurations and characteristics, (b) required comprehensive data that was not fully available for all starting projects, and (c) required significant domain experience to derive accurate estimates. To address these challenges, we collaborated with practitioners at the three firms and developed a new learning-oriented and semi-automated early-stage cost estimation solution that was specifically designed for globally distributed software projects. The key idea of our solution was to augment the existing metrics-driven estimation methods with a case repository that stratified past incidents related to project effort estimation issues from the historical project databases at the firms into several generalizable categories. This repository allowed project managers to quickly and effectively “benchmark” their new projects to all past projects across the firms, and thereby learn from them. We deployed our solution at each of our three research sites for real-world field-testing over a period of six months. Project managers of 219 new large globally distributed projects used both our method to estimate the cost of their projects as well as the established metrics-based estimation approaches they were used to. Our approach achieved significantly reduced estimation errors (of up to 60%). This resulted in more than 20% net cost savings, on average, per project - a massive total cost savings across all projects at the three firms!

Managing Technical Debt in EnterpriseSoftware Packages

We develop an evolutionary model and theory of software technical debt accumulation to facilitate a rigorous and balanced analysis of its benefits and costs in the context of a large commercial enterprise software package. Our theory focuses on the optimization problem involved in managing technical debt, and illustrates the different tradeoff patterns between software quality and customer satisfaction under early and late adopter scenarios at different lifecycle stages of the software package. We empirically verify our theory utilizing a ten year longitudinal data set drawn from 69 customer installations of the software package. We then utilize the empirical results to develop actionable policies for managing technical debt in enterprise software product adoption.

Governing Software Process Improvementsin Globally Distributed Product Development

Continuous software process improvement (SPI) practices have been extensively prescribed to improve performance of software projects. However, SPI implementation mechanisms have received little scholarly attention, especially in the context of distributed software product development. We took an action research approach to study the SPI journey of a large multinational enterprise that adopted a distributed product development strategy. We describe the interventions and action research cycles enacted over a period of five years in collaboration with the firm, which resulted in a custom SPI framework that catered to both the social and technical needs of the firms distributed teams. Institutionalizing the process maturity framework got stalled initially because the SPI initiatives were perceived by product line managers as a mechanism for exercising wider controls by the firms top management. The implementation mechanism was subsequently altered to co-opt product line managers, which contributed to a wider adoption of the SPI framework. Insights that emerge from our analysis of the firms SPI journey pertain to the integration of the technical and social views of software development, preserving process diversity through the use of a multi-tiered, non-blueprint approach to SPI, the linkage between key process areas and project control modes, and the role of SPI in aiding organizational learning.

Towards a model for optimizing technical debt in software products

There is a growing interest in applying the technical debt metaphor to investigate issues related to the tradeoff of the likely long-term costs associated with software design shortcuts for expected short-term business benefits in terms of increased earlier functionality. We propose an optimization model that contrasts the patterns of technical debt accumulation in a software product with the patterns of consumer adoption of the product throughout its evolution. This facilitates a rigorous and balanced analysis of the pros and cons of accumulating technical debt at various lifecycle stages of a software product. We discuss the use of the optimization model to derive policies for managing technical debt and the potential for empirical tests of the model and other future interdisciplinary research.

Structural Complexity and Programmer Team Strategy: An Experimental Test

This study develops and empirically tests the idea that the impact of structural complexity on perfective maintenance of object-oriented software is significantly determined by the team strategy of programmers (independent or collaborative). We analyzed two key dimensions of software structure, coupling and cohesion, with respect to the maintenance effort and the perceived ease-of-maintenance by pairs of programmers. Hypotheses based on the distributed cognition and task interdependence theoretical frameworks were tested using data collected from a controlled lab experiment employing professional programmers. The results show a significant interaction effect between coupling, cohesion, and programmer team strategy on both maintenance effort and perceived ease-of-maintenance. Highly cohesive and low-coupled programs required lower maintenance effort and were perceived to be easier to maintain than the low-cohesive programs and high-coupled programs. Further, our results would predict that managers who strategically allocate maintenance tasks to either independent or collaborative programming teams depending on the structural complexity of software could lower their teams maintenance effort by as much as 70 percent over managers who use simple uniform resource allocation policies. These results highlight the importance of achieving congruence between team strategies employed by collaborating programmers and the structural complexity of software.

HuMan: Creating memorable fingerprints of mobile users

In this paper, we present a new way of generating behavioral (not biometric) fingerprints from the cellphone usage data. In particular, we explore if the generated behavioral fingerprints are memorable enough to be remembered by end users. We built a system, called HuMan, that generates fingerprints from cellphone data. To test HuMan, we conducted an extensive user study that involved collecting about one month of continuous usage data (including calls, SMSes, application usage patterns etc.) from 44 Symbian and Android smartphone users. We evaluated the memorable fingerprints generated from this rich multi-context data by asking each user to answer various authentication questions generated from the fingerprints. Results show that the fingerprints generated by HuMan are remembered by the user to some extent and were moderately secure against attacks even by family members and close friends.