Research Areas

Research

SIS Research Area - Information Systems & Management (IS&M)

The Information Systems Economics, Strategy and Innovation
The Economics of IS and Management Science

Central Concerns and Questions

Theory, modeling and empirical methods from Economics have been important sources for advancing our knowledge of IS management, IT services, software development, and information goods. The economics of IS and management science research stream spans the issues of IT productivity and business value, software engineering economics, the analysis of electronic markets, pricing of cloud computing services, and the design of flexible contracts for IT services. Software engineering economics reflect theoretical and methodological advances for the practice of management science in software development and project management. Our research helps people who are involved in globally-distributed software development to produce high quality products and solutions in an efficient manner.

Studies that we have conducted consider the impacts of IS in terms of productivity, business value, and quality, as well as the impacts on industrial organization, process performance, customer satisfaction, and systems use effects. We further focus on how to use economic theory as a basis for developing an interdisciplinary understanding of investments in IT and the management of the organization in the presence of IT. New forms of software and infrastructure solutions have emerged, changing the structure of the corporate IS practices and the IT services industry in the process. They include infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and open source software.
The questions that interest us also include the following. How should information goods be priced? Will software-as-a-service approaches replace the more traditional software licensing-based business model? How will the broader market for software products be affected? What should traditional software vendors do in response to the emergence of new competitors and new approaches?

Related Research

Representative research in this stream includes the study of customer satisfaction for enterprise software system support services, with a focus on employee skills and customer differences. Technical and behavioural skills of customer support representatives play a major role in influencing overall customer satisfaction with enterprise software system support services. One study develops a conceptual model linking IT-enabled information management capabilities with three important organizational capabilities: customer management capability, process management capability, and performance management capability. These three capabilities mediate the relationship between information management capability and firm performance. The ideas have been applied to the specification of a learning-mediated model of offshore software project productivity and quality. This enabled the further assessment of the efficacy of widely-adopted structured software processes, and whether they are effective in mitigating the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development.

Our research in this stream also has examined the impact of project-level configuration choices for globally-distributed software teams on project productivity, quality and profits. A three-year empirical field study of software development process choices made by project teams at two leading offshore vendors offered useful results. It showed that project team performance affected the choice to augment structured, plan-driven processes to implement the CMM Level 5 Key Process Areas with agile methods.

Another area of study is wireless technology. One research project developed a structural model to examine user demand for voice and short message services, including own and cross-price elasticities. Another article assesses the likely trajectory of development of mobile payment services in light of the underlying economics.
The software-as-a-service market has been an area of more concentrated effort in our research. In one project, we have built an analytical model to study emerging competition between it and modified-off-the-shelf software in the market. We also have explored the advantages and disadvantages of the related business models. Another article in this stream examines how the two business models compete, and why it is likely for them to coexist in the market in the future. The research offers normative guidance for the managers of firms that are contemplating purchasing access to IT resources outside the firm. We are continuing to investigate the competition between these business models for software services in dynamic market settings also. Another interesting topic in our economics of IS and technology research stream is competition among providers that use similar business models, and how firms value the services.

We recently collaborated with a large telecommunications services provider in Singapore, which permitted us to access its client databases and conduct a survey to study consumer preferences for the use of cloud computing services. The results highlight the range of differences in consumer preferences, and provide a basis for the construction of second-degree price discrimination approaches for cloud computing services.

Projects

Software Engineering Economics

Faculty involved: Narayan RAMASUBBU, Rajesh Krishna BALAN