Informatics Research Group Working Papers, Department of Business Studies, Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus
No I-2008-02:
Organizational Change Perspectives on Software Process Improvement
Sune Dueholm Müller ()
, Lars Mathiassen and Hans Henrik Balshøj
Abstract: Many software organizations have engaged in Software
Process Improvement (SPI) and experienced the challenges related to
managing such complex organizational change efforts. As a result, there is
an increasing body of research investigating change management in SPI. To
provide an overview of what we know and don’t know about SPI as
organizational change, this paper addresses the following question: What
are the dominant perspectives on SPI as organizational change in the
literature and how is this knowledge presented and published? All journals
on the AIS ranking list were screened to identify relevant articles and
Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors (1996) were used to analyze this
literature considering the following dimensions of each article:
organizational perspective (metaphor), knowledge orientation (normative
versus descriptive), theoretical emphasis (high versus low), main audience
(practitioner versus academic), geographical origin (Scandinavia, the
Americas, Europe, or the Asia-Pacific), and publication level (high versus
low ranked journal). The review demonstrates that the literature on SPI as
organizational change is firmly grounded in both theory and practice, and
Scandinavia and the Americas are the main contributors to this research.
The distribution of articles across Morgan’s metaphors is uneven and
reveals knowledge gaps that present new avenues for research. The current
literature offers important insights into organizational change in SPI from
machine, organism, and brain perspectives. Practitioners may use these
articles as a guide to SPI insights relevant to their improvement
initiatives. In contrast, the impact of culture, dominance, psychic prison,
flux and transformation, and politics in SPI have only received scant
attention. We argue that these perspectives offer important insights into
the challenges involved in managing change in SPI. Researchers are
therefore advised to engage in new SPI research based on one or more of
these perspectives. Overall, the paper provides a roadmap to help identify
insights and specific articles related to SPI as organizational change.
Keywords: Software Process Improvement; Organizational Change; Organizational Metaphors; Images of Organization; Literature Review; (follow links to similar papers)
29 pages, January 17, 2008
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