| dc.description.abstract | Context: So far, it remains unclear how can software-producing organizations deliberately increase the long-term success rate of strategic alliances while developing their software ecosystem. Many views exist on how individual ecosystem aspects should be managed, but however insofar there exists no complete management framework that software vendors are able to adopt to govern their ecosystem.
Objective: In this paper, we design a comprehensive management toolkit for software vendors. The toolkit is intended to support a holistic process improvement, by facilitating the diagnosis of the situation and the definition of concrete management actions and processes.
Method: Building upon theories and practices of the situational method engineering, we adapt the method-association approach and use it to underpin the management toolkit. We propose the adaptation to the method-association approach, through which it is possible to design management toolkit. We populate the toolkit with practices extracted from the literature on software ecosystem alliance management. In an case study research, we apply the toolkit in the context of a Dutch IT company to derive a partner selection method, and validate the results by means of expert interviews.
Results: Findings indicate that there are seven management areas that increase the success of alliance management within the software ecosystem. The results of the validation further suggest that the designed toolkit could potentially be adopted by software vendors, both to support process improvement and as a method generation tool. To our knowledge, the toolkit approach is the first attempt to provide software vendors with a holistic approach to ensure long-term alliance success.
Conclusions: We conclude that software ecosystem alliance management requires a deliberate and struc- tured approach, through which a multitude of inter-connected incentives can be structurally adopted. Further validations are needed to evolve the toolkit and increase the generalisability of the results, but the case study has already yielded promising results. | |
