Pre-publication: The Effects of Intra-organizational Asymmetries of Knowledge on Software Product Development Performance
From Software Business Community
The Effects of Intra-organizational Asymmetries of Knowledge on Software Product Development Performance
Author
Mikko Rönkkö
Abstract
This document presents the plan for my doctoral thesis. The research question is ”How asymmetries of knowledge between product development unit and marketing unit affect the firm’s software product development capability?”. I will answer this research question through two studies which are reported in five publications. First study is a theory building multiple case study using mainly interview data. The study adopts several components from the grounded theory methodology and can be considered to be a so-called variance study focusing on what separates the software firms that do not have problems of people in the engineering unit not understanding customers and markets and people in marketing and sales units not understanding the technology from those that are experiencing significant problems due to this gap. Making use of snow-balling logic, the interviews proceed down the organizational hierarchy in each case firm to find out when and where the shared understanding of the different functional units break, and with what consequences.
The second study is statistical hypothesis testing using survey data. The main analytical methods are multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling. Since some of the constructs of interest cannot be reliably judged by a single informant, my sample survey follows a multiple informant design, where two additional people in each responding organization are approached after an initial response is received from the organization. Although somewhat rarely used, this design has significant advantages over more common single key informant design.
Each of these two studies is reported as two papers, which are described in more detail in this proposal. In addition, parallel to these four empirical papers, a theory building literature review paper is written.