Abstract:A variety of new forms of business are enabled through globalization and practiced by software organizations today. While companies go global to reduce their development costs, access a larger pool of resources and explore new markets, it is often assumed that the level of delivered services shall remain the same after implementing the sourcing decisions. In contrast, critical studies identified that global software development is associated with unique challenges, and a lot of global projects fail to mitigate the implications of a particular global setting. In this paper we explore offshore insourcing decisions on the basis of empirical research literature and an empirical field study conducted at Ericsson. By analyzing decisions in two different cases we found that each offshore insourcing decision consisted of deciding what, where, when, how and why to insource. Related empirical research and field observations suggest that not all combinations are successful and alignment between different decision points has thus a prominent role. To address these concerns we built an empirically--based insourcing decision structure, which outlines a logical path through the decision options and helps selecting an offshore insourcing strategy that targets creation of the necessary alignment. The key element of the proposed approach is a structured and well--defined decision--making process, which is intended to support managers in their decision--making. The usefulness of the proposed approach is evaluated in an additional empirical case of a new offshore insourcing decision.
Mobile app ratings and reviews are important due to their influence on consumer behavior and the financial consequences for app developers and app platform providers. This paper contributes to prior work by analyzing how rating and review information in combination impact mobile app downloads. To achieve these ends, we utilize daily panel data of 341 gaming (hedonic consumption value-oriented) and productivity (utilitarian consumption value-oriented) apps tracked for almost two years from their release in the Apple App Store. Hence, we contribute to how ratings and reviews matter for the larger majority of apps, whereas previous research has mainly focused on either ratings’ or reviews’ impact on app performance for top-ranked apps. Results of fixed-effects regression analysis reveal different combinatory impacts of text review information (polarity, subjectivity, and review length) and rating information (average rating score, volume of ratings, and dispersion of ratings) on gaming versus productivity app downloads. Important implications of the findings for app developers and platform providers, and for future research into online ratings and reviews, are discussed.
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