Understanding the role of organizational integration in developing and operating Software-as-a-Service

While previous research has mostly studied Software-as-a-Service from a client perspective or focused on downstream activities of vendors, an in-depth understanding of the coordination and communication between software development and software operations is still missing. In order to fill this gap, we develop a theoretical framework that integrates extant literature on the constituent characteristics of services and on organizational integration. Guided by this framework and based on a multiple-case study of six software vendors, we identify five types of challenges and opportunities of organizational integration between Software-as-a-Service development and operations. The challenges include ensuring awareness and continuity between operations and development, as well as considering customers’ business activities in scheduling updates. The opportunities relate to the ability to leverage a direct feedback channel and innovate with higher velocity. In addition, service mindset, technical harmonization, and company size emerged as three contingency factors that enable or inhibit organizational integration. The study contributes to existing literature by providing a better understanding of the activities that require coordination and communication when developing and operating Software-as-a-Service. Moreover, this study adds to previous research by linking the integration of organizational subunits to constituent characteristics of services. Decision makers learn about challenges and opportunities when offering Software-as-a-Service that go beyond providing a technical infrastructure.     

What is Inclusive Development? Introducing the Multidimensional Inclusiveness Index

Social Indicators Research - Despite decreasing global poverty, feelings of increasing inequalities drive growing dissatisfaction with development outcomes. Inclusive development benefiting larger...     

Struktur und Entwicklung der Rechnungslegungsforschung in deutschen wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften

Against the dynamic background of the convergence of German financial accounting standards to its international counterparts as well as an increasingly internationally oriented accounting research, the authors of this article seek to present a contribution to improve our understanding of the structure and development of German financial accounting research. To this end, they analyse the co-citation patterns of 681 research articles on financial accounting topics published between 1970 and 2007 in four leading German academic journals. The study’s findings show that while the structure of German financial accounting research has experienced profound change over time it is still different from that in international accounting research.     

Speaking Acquaintances or Helpers in Need: Participation in Civic Associations and Individual Social Capital

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - It is widely believed that civic associations are capable to produce social capital, here understood as an individual...     

Home Front: Post-Deployment Mental Health and Divorces

Since 2003, about 14 % of U.S. Army soldiers have reported symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following deployments. In this article, we examine how post-deployment symptoms of PTSD and of other mental health conditions are related to the probability of divorce among married active-duty U.S. Army soldiers. For this purpose, we combine Army administrative individual-level longitudinal data on soldiers’ deployments, marital history, and sociodemographic characteristics with their self-reported post-deployment health information. Our estimates indicate that time spent in deployment increases the divorce risk among Army enlisted personnel and that PTSD symptoms are associated with further increases in the odds of divorce. Although officers are generally less likely to screen positive for PTSD than enlisted personnel, we find a stronger relationship between PTSD symptoms and divorces among Army officers who are PTSD-symptomatic than among enlisted personnel. We estimate a larger impact of deployments on the divorce risk among female soldiers, but we do not find a differential impact of PTSD symptoms by gender. Also, we find that most of the effect of PTSD symptoms occurs early in the career of soldiers who deploy multiple times.     

Pricing of Full‐Service Repair Contracts with Learning,Optimized Maintenance,and Information Asymmetry

This article considers the optimal pricing of full‐service (FS) repair contracts by taking into account learning and maintenance efficiency effects, competition from service , and asymmetric information. We analyze on‐call service (OS) and FS contracts in a market where customers exhibit heterogeneous risk aversion. While the customers minimize their disutility over the equipment lifetime, the service provider maximizes expected profits arising from the portfolio of OS and FS contracts. We show that the optimal FS price depends inter alia on the customer's prior cost experience and on OS repair and maintenance costs. The optimal FS price is shown to increase as fewer OS customers are lost to competition, whereas improved repair learning enabled by FS reduces the optimal price. A numerical study based on data from a manufacturer of forklifts highlights the importance of learning in maintenance operations, which constitutes the key benefit of FS contracts; 81% of the customers select the FS option and are willing to pay an insurance premium of around 1.5% of total OS cost against volatility of repair costs.     

Blocking in Healthcare Operations: A New Heuristic and an Application

We consider the problem of optimal capacity allocation in a hospital setting, where patients pass through a set of units, for example intensive care and acute care (AC), or AC and post‐acute care. If the second stage is full, a patient whose service at the first stage is complete is blocked and cannot leave the first stage. We develop a new heuristic for tandem systems to efficiently evaluate the effects of such blocking on system performance and we demonstrate that this heuristic performs well when compared with exact solutions and other approaches presented in the literature. In addition, we show how our tandem heuristic can be used as a building block to model more complex multi‐stage hospital systems with arbitrary patient routing, and we derive insights and actionable capacity strategies for a real hospital system where such blocking occurs between units.