Impacts of collaborative information systems quality on software development success in Indian software firms

Abstract

With the rapid advances in information technology (IT) in last few decades, software development has become a high-growth industry. While the software development process is an extremely complicated, iterative, unpredictable, knowledge-intensive, as well as an expensive process, a supportive collaborative information system (CIS) is indispensible for allowing complex interdependencies among globally distributed team members. The current work studies the role of CIS qualities and their impact on Individual, Organizational, and Project success using DeLone and McLean's (D&M) Information System (IS) Success Model as the basis for developing a theoretical framework. This study adopts a Partial Least Square (PLS) approach to analyze data collected from 154 questionnaires distributed to Indian software companies. The results indicate that CIS qualities, especially service quality strongly influence individual impacts and organizational impacts and hence software project success. This paper's contribution is the research into these three success areas in relation to CIS, and particularly, organizational success, as opposed to other current work being done on project success. The current study is the first to extend the IS success model into a collaborative context. In addition, because the study was done on the Indian software industry, it provides a glimpse into an industry that has rarely been studied. We hope that the current study can improve managerial understanding of a more productive and efficient IS for working within a distributed teamwork environment.