What can move non-IS developers towards open and collaborative development initiatives?

Abstract

Information systems (IS) have been developed to meet the increasingly complex demands of organisations and society, with a growing understanding of the need for multidisciplinary competencies. It is critical that IS development specialists work with users to conceive and build IS, especially in open and collaborative innovation initiatives. Making these initiatives accessible to non-IS developers can be an opportunity to provide solutions best suited to meet the needs of an application context and more appropriate to the expectations of their target audience. However, non-IS developers are generally unwilling to participate in initiatives for IS development, even open and collaborative ones, due to their lack of technological skills. Our research objective is to identify factors that can influence them to participate, having the Theory of Planned Behaviour as our theoretical basis. We conducted a qualitative interview-based and interpretative study of five open and collaborative development initiatives in Brazilian universities. Results show that the main (beliefs and cognitive) factors influencing non-IS developers to engage are: being able to create useful solutions to the community; professional growth; receiving help from mentors; achieving goals; receiving support from colleagues; availability of tools to facilitate software development; and experiencing new IS development opportunities. These results support organisations to establish guidelines to engage non-IS developers in open and collaborative development initiatives, improving multidisciplinarity and open innovation.