Gwanhoo Lee

Associate Professor, ITM

Director of the Center for IT and the Global Economy

Kogod School of Business, American University

April 27, 2012

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Balancing Rigor, Standardization, and Agility in Distributed IS Development: An Ambidexterity Perspective

Abstract

Distributed information systems (IS) development faces daunting challenges including communication and coordination difficulties, increased user requirement uncertainty, and greater task complexity. To cope with such challenges, distributed IS teams attempt to build effective development process capabilities such as process rigor, process standardization, and process agility. However, the complex effects of these process capabilities on distributed IS development performance are not well understood or empirically validated. To fill this gap in our knowledge, we investigate how rigor, standardization, and agility of development process respectively affect the performance of the system delivered by a distributed team. Furthermore and more importantly, we investigate the notion of IS development process ambidexterity which is defined as the simultaneous presence of alignment and agility in development process, where rigor and standardization represent two dimensions of alignment. We examine if such process ambidexterity demonstrates a positive effect on system performance. We used hierarchical regression to analyze field data from project managers of distributed IS development. Our results support a positive main effect of rigor, standardization, and agility on system performance in distributed development. We find a positive interaction effect of rigor and agility, indicating a synergistic effect of process ambidexterity. Contrary to our expectation, however, we find a negative interaction effect of standardization and agility, indicating an offsetting effect of process ambidexterity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for balancing rigor, standardization, and agility in distributed development in order to achieve better system performance.

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Allen Lee

Dean’s Scholar Professor

Virginia Commonwealth University

April 13, 2012

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Linking Relevance to Practical Significance

Abstract

Researchers in academic disciplines, including but not limited to information systems, have long been aware of, but have not linked, two research issues: one issue is the lack of relevance, despite the plethora of rigor, in their research; the other issue is the distinction between statistical significance and practical significance, where the latter is no less important than the former. In this essay, we link the two issues by examining and revealing the practical significance of the research reported in a well known, published article and stating the questions that this examination raises.

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