IT Value of Software Development: A Multi-theoretic Perspective

Abstract

Software development in organizations is evolving and increasingly taking a socio-technical hue. While empirical research guided by common sense reasoning has informed researchers and the software community in the past, the increasing social character of software development provides us with the context and the motivation to provide theoretical underpinnings to our empirical work. In this paper we sample three theoretical domains that could serve our empirical research efforts: social capital, organizational learning and knowledge based view of the firm. We illustrate the utility of these theoretical perspectives by articulating a research model that captures the IT value created by software development teams practicing different methodologies.