thesis on IS development
Thesis defence at HEC Montréal, on “Three essays on IS development”, by Gregory Vial, supervised by Suzanne Rivard
Information systems development (ISD) projects are complex and challenging endeavors. Seeking to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the ISD process, practitioners have relied on various strategies to organize ISD. This thesis is composed of three essays which all rely on organizational theory as a reference discipline to provide the theoretical lenses that can help us increase our understanding of two of those strategies: (1) outsourced ISD and (2) agile ISD. The first essay adopts a deductive approach and draws from institutional theory to build a process explanation on effects of differences between parties in outsourced ISD projects. The second essay focuses on agile ISD to investigate, using a multiple case study design, how project teams experience agility in ISD projects. The third essay adopts a deductive approach to propose a novel conceptualization of ISD as an organizational routine and explore the theoretical and empirical implications of this conceptualization using agile ISD as a contextual application. Overall the three essays that form this thesis address important questions to build theoretical as well as empirical insight in a rigorous manner on relevant topics of ISD research.
