Structural and Behavioral Fit in Software Sourcing Alignment

Abstract

In recent years, the corporate software ecosystem has been subject to tremendous changes. Vendors are increasingly offering enterprise systems in a Software-as-a-Service setting. For most of their applications, client companies can now choose between developing software in-house or sourcing packaged software in an on-premises or on-demand mode. However, no attempt has been made so far to explicitly compare these three sourcing arrangements with each other in terms of alignment and performance. The presented paper makes a contribution to fill this research gap. Drawing upon the ontological view of information systems, we develop a novel understanding of software sourcing arrangements. Based on exploratory case studies that are analyzed in the light of extant literature, we examine different types of fit arising from a structural and behavioral dimension of software sourcing. We further show how these types of fit are interrelated and discuss their performance implications.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.