Tommi Kramer

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.

Enrichment of Smart Home Services by Integrating Social Network Services and Big Data Analytics

Smart homes have gained attraction for several years in peoples daily lives and are still increasing. They provide a fruitful foundation for the creation of social network services as they escort habits and regular activities of people at home, along their way or even at work. Smart homes and their current development stage are not only able to support people by intelligent functionality but also to predict the behavior or even the interaction with the social network of a person. For that, smart home technology makes strong use of big data techniques that help to master the vast amount of data generated continuously. In this paper we conduct a literature research that investigates the current state-of-the-art of smart homes and the related generation of social network services in a big data driven environment. We reveal future research opportunities that emerge from the combination of mastering big data in smart homes and, hence, provide design recommendations for social network services.

Enhanced Human-Computer Interaction for Business Applications on Mobile Devices: A Design-Oriented Development of a Usability Evaluation Questionnaire

Over the last few years mobile technology has gained enormous growth in the field of human-computer interaction as it became an essential part of our societys everyday life. Specific mobile characteristics such as availability, computational power, or high-resolution displays make these devices very useful, even in a business environment. However, usability plays a crucial role when it comes to software design for human-computer interaction with mobile devices. In order to achieve a high level of usability in user interfaces of application software, it is essential to ensure usability quality during the development process. Therefore, we have developed a specific questionnaire for evaluating the usability of mobile business apps as well as a corresponding Web-based software tool for simplifying the assessment. In this paper, we follow a design science research approach and evaluate our designed artifacts in expert interviews where we demonstrate the utility and applicability of the questionnaire and tool.

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.

IT Global Delivery Model Efficiency: An Exploratory Case Study to Identify Input and Output Factors

During recent years, leading international service providers have implemented global delivery model (GDM) strategies in which multiple geographically dispersed resources are simultaneously integrated in a network of onshore, nearshore and farshore service and delivery centers. Although GDMs are well established within the IT service industry, little is known about how to assess their properties and performance. Drawing upon the resource-based view of the firm, this paper attempts to offer two contributions. First, we identify six input (resources) and six output (performance) variables that can be used to assess the relative efficiency of GDMs in IT. Second, we reveal an increasing importance of proactive managerial skills to orchestrate resources within such networks.

Cross-Organizational Software Development: Design and Evaluation of a Decision Support System for Software Component Outsourcing

While the decision to outsource software development tasks was mainly considered strategically and economically, it relies on technical properties of single components and their integrability into complex systems, as well. This paper suggests a decision model that evaluates technical properties of software components to support the outsourcing decision with its implications on the cross-organizational distribution of development tasks. Following a design science approach decision criteria are deduced and logically combined in order to design a decision model. The model is then used to implement a mobile prototype for a decision support system in order to classify all software components regarding their outsourcing applicability. Both model and tool are evaluated in depth: we examine the quality of model and tool in a naturalistic and experimental evaluation setting. The overall satisfaction with utility, ease of use and intention to use is very positive.

Software Outsourcing Decision Aid (SODA): A Requirements Based Decision Support Method and Tool

This paper seeks to address the decision making problem in IS development outsourcing scenarios in which a project manager is in charge of deciding about which software components shall be outsourced and which ones shall be developed internally. Therefore, we propose a method and tool which leverage the classification of a project’s software components by means of a graph-based model of the components’ requirements and their corresponding clustering. In the course of our design oriented approach, a prototypical implementation of the method has been conducted and evaluated. It illustrates the practical utility of the proposed method. We thereby contribute to the decision making problem in distributed software projects and provide guidance for in-house or external software production. The contribution consists of revealing an improved processing method for assessing software requirements and increasing the outsourcing success of a software project. Our contribution for practice is an implemented prototype for project leaders of distributed teams. In this research, we have emphasized deriving design requirements from underlying theories as well as the evaluation of the outcomes.