M. S. Krishnan

• PhD
• Professor at University of Michigan

Information technology (IT) plays a vital role in customer relationship management (CRM), because CRM processes include the collection and analysis of customer information, firms use technology tools to interact with customers, and IT created the conditions under which firms can offshore CRM processes. Customers have negative perceptions toward off...

How do IT-enabled capabilities influence the ability of firms to leverage customer involvement to shape amount of innovation? This study argues and theorizes that effective processing and management of customer information flows requires that organizations possess what we call as relational information processing capability (RIPC) and analytical in...

Despite the increasing use of onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO), a comprehensive literature review [38] finds that there has been limited empirical research on BPO outcomes. This article responds to the call for research by developing and testing a conceptual model for BPO outcomes using data from 50 firms publicly traded in t...

This paper studies the effect of aggregate information technology (IT) investments on customer satisfaction and profits at the firm level. Using data on 109 U.S. firms for the 1994-1996 and 1999-2006 periods, we find that aggregate IT investments have a positive association with customer satisfaction. However, the strength of the relationship varie...

Given the recent concern on “big governments” and rising budget deficits in the United States and European nations, there has been a fundamental economic debate on the proper boundary and role of governments in a society. Inspired by this debate, we study the relationship between information technology (IT) and government size. Drawing on a broad r...

This paper aims at exploring value creation from information technologies in governments. While the majority of studies in the information systems discipline have focused on discovering IT business value in for-profit organizations, the question of whether the performance effect of IT exists in the public sector has not been extensively studied so...

This study investigates the effect of information technology (IT) architecture flexibility on strategic alliance formation and firm value. We first examine the effect of three dimensions of IT architecture flexibility (open communication standards, cross-functional transparency, and modularity) on formation of three types of alliances (arm's-length...

Simultaneously achieving efficiency and flexibility in enterprise software production has been a considerable challenge for firms. Newer software development paradigms such as component-based and model-driven development attempt to overcome this challenge by emphasizing modular design of complex systems. However, there is a paucity of rigorous empi...

While Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networks have been popular in the consumer space, there is significant variation in adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in business. Yet, little is known about why firms adopt Web 2.0 technologies. There is a paucity of empirical research examining the antecedents of the use of Web 2.0 techno...

It has been theorized that the online environment has lower search costs due to the ease of comparing prices across various retailers. However, recent empirical evidence has shown that despite potential lower search costs, prices for homogeneous goods do not converge; instead, price dispersion, the distribution of prices across vendors, is greater...

We present an integrated framework for managing product variety in software features. Our framework includes multiple perspectives of variety that links customer requirements in software products to cost incurred by software developers. This link is established by identifying specific features in software products. We report empirical validation of...

This paper identifies and analyzes firm-level characteristics that facilitate onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO). We use organizational learning and capabilities to develop a conceptual model. We test the conceptual model with archival data on a broad cross section of U.S. firms. Our empirical findings indicate that firms with...

Information Technology (IT) Usage is an important construct in Information Systems research. While the relationship between IT Usage and Performance is well studied along with the antecedents of IT Usage, extant research has not yet fully explored an integrated model of IT Usage, its antecedents and impact on performance. In this paper, we propose...

The evolving role of Information Technology (IT) in business innovation places increasing emphasis on the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Yet, the role of the CIO in business innovation is understudied in the extant literature. Drawing on organizational theory of boundary spanning leadership, we posit that the CIO's cross-functional ro...

Customer involvement in product and service development (CIPS) is recognized as important for firms; yet the role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating CIPS is understudied. We examine two enterprise technologies which improve knowledge available to decision makers: Business Intelligence (BI) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Whi...

Economic models suggest that firms use a simple cost-benefit calculation to evaluate customer requests for new product features, but an extensive organizational literature shows the decision to implement innovation is more nuanced. We address this theoretical tension by studying how firms respond to customer requests for incremental product innovat...

Introduction It is commonly acknowledged that success in IT projects is difficult to achieve. A recent industry survey observed that only 34% of IT projects were considered successful. Of the several potential factors contributing to this hard-to-achieve success, user involvement was noted as the most important one. Consistent with this notion, bot...

While Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networks have been popular in the consumer space, there is significant variation in adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in business. Yet, little is known about why firms adopt Web 2.0 technologies. There is a paucity of empirical research examining the antecedents of the use of Web 2.0 techno...

Firms are increasingly using onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) to manage their front and back office functions. While most IS research uses transaction cost economics (TCE) to study the transaction-level characteristics that facilitate outsourcing, to advance theory there is a need to focus on the firm-level characteristics th...

Are customers in different countries alike in their preferences for similar software products? In this article, we examine the relative importance of 5 dimensions of product quality across customers from North America and Japan. Based on data collected from over 400 customers of a representative sample of electronic- (e-) commerce software products...

Despite the importance of causal analysis to build a valid base of knowledge and to answer managerial questions, the issue of causality rarely receives the attention it deserves in published empirical work in information systems (IS) and management research that uses observational data. In this paper, we discuss a potential outcomes framework for e...

While IT vendors have made significant improvements in the process maturity of software development, growth of information technology outsourcing and distributed software development have posed new challenges in managing software projects. In this paper we develop and test empirical models of productivity and conformance quality in the context of d...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology promises to transform supply chain management. Building on previous research in information systems and supply chain management, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for RFID adoption and benefits, and tests the framework using data on U.S. firms. Our analysis suggests that there is a positive...

This paper studies the influence of supply-side and demand-side factors on the compensation of information technology (IT) professionals and considers the human capital and institutional explanations. We focus on returns to an MBA and the IT-related experience of IT professionals and use the largest data set of IT professionals that has been compil...

Although firms have invested significant resources in implementing enterprise software systems (ESS) to modernize and integrate their business process infrastructure, customer satisfaction with ESS has remained an understudied phenomenon. In this exploratory research study, we investigate customer satisfaction for support services of ESS and focus...

Alliances represent a variety of governance contexts, and hence provide a rich empirical setting for studying the value-creation mechanisms of Information Technology (IT). We examine the influence of IT investment and flexible IT infrastructure, through Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in the effect of alliance activity on firm performance. We...

This special issue of Information Systems Research includes six papers that investigate the role of information technology for the management of the extended enterprise in the global economy. These papers contribute to our theoretical and practical understanding of how IT is restructuring occupations and industries and how firms can leverage IT for...

We examine the relationship between firms’ human resources (HR) practices and their information technology (IT) practices, focusing on the dichotomy between autonomy and control. We define facilitating HR practices as those that exhibit the following characteristics: worker autonomy, connectedness, learning, valuing individuals, trust, and flexibil...

Web sites are important components of Internet strategy for organizations. This paper develops a theoretical model for understanding the effect of Web site design elements on customer loyalty to a Web site. We show the relevance of the business domain of a Web site to gain a contextual understanding of relative importance of Web site design element...

Service Oriented Architecture ("SOA") has been viewed as a strategic approach to IT that provides increased flexibility. However, there is scant research evidence of SOA adoption leading to tangible performance benefits across a cross section of firms. We fill this research gap by empirically analyzing the impact of SOA adoption on the performance...

We empirically analyze the impact of SOA adoption on performance benefits of information sharing in supply chains using a dataset of 305 large US firms. We show that complexity and transparency of information sharing process significantly impact performance. Information sharing complexity has a negative effect while transparency has a positive effe...

This article provides an assessment of the causal effect of customer relationship management (CRM) applications on one-to-one marketing effectiveness. We use a potential outcomes based propensity score approach to assess this causal effect. We find that firms using CRM systems have greater levels of one-to-one marketing effectiveness. We discuss th...

Do investments in customer satisfaction lead to excess returns? If so, are these returns associated with higher stock market risk? The empirical evidence presented in this article suggests that the answer to the first question is yes, but equally remarkable, the answer to the second question is no, suggesting that satisfied customers are economic a...

This research evaluates the effect of customer relationship management (CRM) on customer knowledge and customer satisfaction. An analysis of archival data for a cross-section of U.S. firms shows that the use of CRM applications is positively associated with improved customer knowledge and improved customer satisfaction. This article also shows that...

Firms today use information about customers to improve service and design personalized offerings. To do this successfully, however, firms must collect consumer information. This study enhances awareness about a central paradox for firms investing in personalization; namely, that consumers who value information transparency are also less likely to p...

In this paper we develop a learning-mediated model of offshore software project productivity and quality to examine whether widely adopted structured software processes are effective in mitigating the negative effects of work dispersion in offshore software development. We explicate how the key process areas of the capability maturity model (CMM) c...

Code inspections continue to gain significance as a software verification scheme since Fagan introduced the concept. Software engineering researchers examining the value of code inspections have exclusively focused on defect removal benefits of inspections. In this paper we develop and test empirical models of both quality improvement and project m...

Anecdotal reports suggest that offshoring may have negative implications for North American consumers. Despite the anecdotal reports, North American firms are increasingly offshoring front office functions such as customer service and back office functions such as IT. This leads to two primary research questions. Does front office offshoring actual...

Do investments in customer satisfaction lead to excess returns? If so, are these returns associated with higher stock market risk? The empirical evidence presented in this article suggests that the answer to the first question is yes, but equally remarkable, the answer to the second question is no, suggesting that satisfied customers are economic a...

Software metrics programs are an important part of a software organization's productivity and quality initiatives as precursors to process-based improvement programs. Like other innovative practices, the implementation of metrics programs is prone to influences from the greater institutional environment the organization exists in. In this paper, we...

This research addresses the following questions: Do information technology (IT) investments have an effect on customer satisfaction? What are the causal mechanisms that mediate the effect of IT systems on customer satisfaction? Does the effect of IT on customer satisfaction differ across industry sectors? Based on an analysis of longitudinal data o...

The popular and well-tested software process frameworks such as the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model and ISO 9001, details key process areas for software development. Focusing more on continuous improvement in code development processes, generic-process frameworks such as the CMM lack key process areas (KPA) that address c...

Distributed software development is pervasive in the software industry as companies vie to leverage global resources. However popular quality and process frameworks do not specifically address the key processes needed for managing distributed software development. We develop an evolutionary process maturity framework for globally distributed softwa...

Open Source Software (\OSS") has attracted a lot of research interest but focus has primarily been on the development process (\supply side")and not on the \demand-side" of OSS. Further, there is limited empirical investigation of the impact of OSS adoption. In this study we have attempted to flll the gap and empirically analyzed impact of OSS adop...

We provide a framework and modelling approach to assess alignment of product variety for a software firm in meeting customer requirements and efficiently managing customer satisfaction. Our framework includes assessment of customer satisfaction and market alignment at multiple levels such as the market, firm and product levels. We define quantitati...

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the notion of capabilities as an important source of competitive advantage. This recognition has, in turn, placed emphasis on the question of where and how these capabilities emerge and how they influence firm performance. The present paper is an attempt to address this question. Using a large samp...

In this paper we address the problem of increasing software maintenance costs in a custom software development environment, and develop a stochastic decision model for the maintenance of information systems. Based on this modeling framework, we derive an optimal decision rule for software systems maintenance, and present sensitivity analysis of the...

The starting point for this paper is the general paucity of research on the demand-side of custom software development. As an initial step, we derive and estimate a Hedonic Pricing model using a sample of 160 projects executed by a large software solutions vendor based in India. Our results indicate that there are powerful economic incentives spurr...

While IT vendors have made significant improvements in the process maturity of software development, growth of information technology outsourcing and distributed software development have posed new challenges in managing software projects. In this paper we develop and test empirical models of productivity and conformance quality in the context of d...

Information technology (IT) management capabilities have been noted in prior research as having a significant impact on firm performance. However, it is not clear how these capabilities impact firm performance. This research focuses in particular on one salient IT management capability, viz., IT infrastructure capability, and develops a conceptual...

We study the determinants of contract choice in offshore software development projects and examine how the choice of contract and other factors in the project affect project profits accruing to the software vendor. Using data collected on 93 offshore projects from a leading Indian software vendor, we provide evidence that specific vendor-, client-,...

To produce high quality object-oriented (OO) applications, a strong emphasis on design aspects, especially during the early phases of software development, is necessary. Design metrics play an important role in helping developers understand design aspects of software and, hence, improve software quality and developer productivity. In this paper, we...

Abstract As customer information becomes a criticalsucc ess factor in the global networked economy, privacy is of strategic importance. Firm s are able to use information to improve customer service and offer personalized features. By understanding the factors affecting consumerwillingness to share information, managers

The concept of an "average" manager is inappropriate in the world of agility, where local conditions constantly change and managers have to act fast. The authors believe that this is the new challenge to both line managers and IT organizations. In this cut-throat, weakness-revealing economy, companies can no longer afford to simply sweep the proble...

The impact of low search costs in Internet markets has received a great deal of attention in the academic literature and in the press. While many have argued that the presence of low search costs will lead to strong price competition and vanishing margins, the empirical evidence is decidely mixed. Reflecting this uncertainty, firms have taken radic...

This paper uses a hierarchical linear modeling approach to examine factors that affect Website effectiveness from a customer viewpoint. Use of hierarchical linear modeling allows analysis of multilevel and cross-level interactions that have not been explicitly considered in previous research. Our preliminary analysis of online Web survey data sugge...

Measurement programs in software organizations are an important source of control over quality and cost in software development. The findings of this research presented here are based on an industry-wide survey conducted to examine the factors that influence success in software metrics programs. Our approach is to go beyond the anecdotal informatio...

In a field study conducted at a leading Fortune 100 company, we examined how having development teams reside in their own large room (an arrangement called radical collocation) affected system development. The collocated projects had significantly higher productivity and shorter schedules than both the industry benchmarks and the performance of pas...

This article develop an approach to reconcile the disconnection between the business managers and IT managers. It is a an application scorecard to facilitate dialogue within corporations and enable business managers and IT managers to close the gap

Offshore software development is a new trend in the information technology (IT) outsourcing field, fueled by the globalization of IT and the improvement of telecommunication facilities. Countries such as India, Ireland, and Israel have established a significant presence in this market. In this article, we discuss how software processes affect offsh...

We examine the relationship between life-cycle productivity and conformance quality in software products. The effects of product size, personnel capability, software process, usage of tools, and higher front-end investments on productivity and conformance quality were analyzed to derive managerial implications based on primary data collected on com...

The information technology (IT) industry is characterized by rapid innovation and intense competition. To survive, IT firms must develop high quality software products on time and at low cost. A key issue is whether high levels of quality can be achieved without adversely impacting cycle time and effort. Conventional beliefs hold that processes to...

Companies are experimenting with putting teams into warrooms, hoping for some productivity enhancement. We conducted a field study of six such teams, tracking their activity, attitudes, use of technology and productivity. Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity. Why? Among other things, teams had easy access to each other for both...

In this paper, an empirical study that links software process consistency with product defects is reported. Various measurement issues such as validity, reliability, and other challenges in measuring process consistency at the project level are discussed. A measurement scale for software process consistency is introduced. An empirical study that us...

This article discusses the concept of RTS (Returns To Scale) in the framework of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) production and cost analyses, focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty. Dual relationships between production-based and cost-based RTS estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study...

In this paper we review the progress in software process research and the role of process improvement in enhancing business outcomes of software projects. We first describe the process view of software development. Next, we review the literature on software process research and discuss some of the leading software process models. The business value...

Software applications are now a mission-critical source of competitive advantage for most companies. They are also a source of great risk, as the Y2K bug has made clear. Yet many line managers still haven't confronted software issues--partly because they aren't sure how best to define the quality of the applications in their IT infrastructures. Som...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a linear-programming-based method for assessing the performance of homogeneous organizational units and is increasingly being used in banking. The unit of assessment is normally the bank branch. Studies are mostly centered on deriving a summary measure of the efficiency of each unit, on estimating targets of perfo...

We study the drivers of customer satisfaction for Intranet marketing application systems. Based on the existing literature on business value of information technology, we provide a framework to understand the drivers of overall customer satisfaction with Intranet solutions. Our analysis based on data collected from a survey of over thirty firms tha...

In this article, authors focus on investments in software quality improvements considering the explosive growth of the software industry in recent years. According to authors, to remain competitive, software firms must deliver high quality products on time, but it is equally important to consider their budget. Experiences in manufacturing relating...

In this paper, we study the drivers of customer satisfaction for financial services. We discuss a full Bayesian analysis based on data collected from customers of a leading financial services company. Our approach allows us to explicitly accommodate missing data and enables quantitative assessment of the impact of the drivers of satisfaction across...

This paper examines the impact of team factors in software development, such as the domain and language experience of the team members and the personnel capability of the team, on the costs and quality of the software products. The measure of the quality of the software products is based on the number of unique field problems that customers reporte...

Rapid innovation, intense competition, and the drive to survive have compelled information technology (IT) firms to seek ways to develop high quality software quickly and productively. The critical issues faced by these firms are the inter-relationships, sometimes viewed as trade-offs, between quality, cycle time, and effort in the software develop...

This paper describes an empirical study of the relationship between life-cycle cost, quality and customer satisfaction in software development projects. Our analysis enables the identification of management strategies for new product enhancements and service support. We study the relationship between life-cycle cost and quality using a dataset of 2...

We study the key determinants of customer satisfaction with software products. Our analysis, based upon a large sample of over 2,500 customer responses, suggests that capability and usability are the critical drivers of overall customer satisfaction. We also find that the importance of seven key satisfaction factors differs across customer and prod...

An abstract is not available.

Web sites are important components of Internet strategy for organizations. This paper develops a theoretical model for understanding the effect of Web site design elements on customer loyalty to a Web site. We show the relevance of the business domain of a Web site to gain a contextual understanding of relative importance of Web site design element...

The growth of information technology outsourcing and distributed software development have posed new challenges in managing software projects. In this paper we develop and test empirical models of project performance in the context of high maturity distributed software development. By analyzing data collected on more than forty large distributed co...

Competition in electronic markets raises a variety of new and important issues for IT managers. Among these issues is how a customer's experience with web site design relates to customers' purchase behavior. Firms have taken radically different approaches to web design, with varying levels of success. Some firms have used IT to recognize consumer p...