TY - GEN
T1 - CIO herds and user gangs in the adoption of open source software
AU - Miralles, Francesc
AU - Sieber, Sandra
AU - Valor, Josep
PY - 2005
Y1 - 2005
N2 - Open Source Software (OSS) has received wide attention from the research community, analyzing both the innovation process of software development by distributed and unrelated teams, and the market dynamics at play between free" and proprietary software. Up until now, OSS adoption has been irregular, although it seems to be breaking the dominance of existing players in some market segments. In this paper, we contend that due to the particularities of its development process, traditional ways of explaining IT adoption -rational decision making, technology diffusion models, and the psychology of the decision maker-are insufficient to explain the case of OSS diffusion. We believe that the existence of a strong and diffused development community leads to a new role of the user community, as both are intertwined. In addition, new concerns for social corporate responsibility and welfare create a new context, in which user gangs" may exert some degrees of pressure on the IT decision maker. Through the analysis of some significant cases we depict under which conditions significant OSS adoption may unfold, showing that in two of the cases studied user gangs play a significant role. The resulting preliminary framework will inform future work, in which we aim at validating the emerging insights gained in this research.
AB - Open Source Software (OSS) has received wide attention from the research community, analyzing both the innovation process of software development by distributed and unrelated teams, and the market dynamics at play between free" and proprietary software. Up until now, OSS adoption has been irregular, although it seems to be breaking the dominance of existing players in some market segments. In this paper, we contend that due to the particularities of its development process, traditional ways of explaining IT adoption -rational decision making, technology diffusion models, and the psychology of the decision maker-are insufficient to explain the case of OSS diffusion. We believe that the existence of a strong and diffused development community leads to a new role of the user community, as both are intertwined. In addition, new concerns for social corporate responsibility and welfare create a new context, in which user gangs" may exert some degrees of pressure on the IT decision maker. Through the analysis of some significant cases we depict under which conditions significant OSS adoption may unfold, showing that in two of the cases studied user gangs play a significant role. The resulting preliminary framework will inform future work, in which we aim at validating the emerging insights gained in this research.
KW - CIO herding
KW - IT adoption
KW - Open Source Software
KW - User communities
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84871009642&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84871009642
SN - 3937195092
SN - 9783937195094
T3 - Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Information Systems, Information Systems in a Rapidly Changing Economy, ECIS 2005
BT - Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Information Systems, Information Systems in a Rapidly Changing Economy, ECIS 2005
T2 - 13th European Conference on Information Systems, Information Systems in a Rapidly Changing Economy, ECIS 2005
Y2 - 26 May 2005 through 28 May 2005
ER -