Information technology (IT) plays a vital role in customer relationship management (CRM), because CRM processes include the collection and analysis of customer information, firms use technology tools to interact with customers, and IT created the conditions under which firms can offshore CRM processes. Customers have negative perceptions toward offshoring, which suggests that firms might be reluctant to offshore IT-enabled CRM processes. However, firms have significantly increased offshoring for CRM processes, presenting a conundrum. Why would firms increase offshoring for CRM processes if there could be a risk to customer satisfaction?This paper helps to resolve the conundrum by studying the impact of CRM sourcing on customer satisfaction with the firm’s products and services, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction IndexTM. We analyze data for 150 North American firms and business units over a nine-year period. Front office offshore outsourcing and front office onshore outsourcing are both negatively associated with customer satisfaction, which suggests that negative customer perceptions may be due to the firm boundary dimension rather than the geographic location dimension. Front office offshore outsourcing is not statistically significant for services firms, which suggests that customers are more accepting of offshore providers in a service setting. Over time, the coefficient for back office offshore outsourcing has become more positive, which suggests that firms may expect to see a similar improvement for front office offshore outsourcing in the future. Our empirical results provide a basis to understand why firms have increased IT-enabled CRM offshoring despite short-term risks to customer satisfaction.

Despite the increasing use of onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO), a comprehensive literature review [38] finds that there has been limited empirical research on BPO outcomes. This article responds to the call for research by developing and testing a conceptual model for BPO outcomes using data from 50 firms publicly traded in the U.S., including 38 firms in the Forbes Global 2000. We find that client firm capabilities, vendor configuration, and country location lead to interesting tradeoffs in the BPO quality, cost, and time outcomes. For example, while multi-sourcing offers advantages such as risk mitigation, client firms encounter reduced BPO time benefits when they use multiple vendors. While onshore BPO can lead to an improved quality, higher onshore labor costs result in lower BPO cost savings. And while offshore destinations such as India offer lower labor costs, time zone differences lead to reduced BPO time benefits.

Software metrics programs are an important part of a software organization's productivity and quality initiatives as precursors to process-based improvement programs. Like other innovative practices, the implementation of metrics programs is prone to influences from the greater institutional environment the organization exists in. In this paper, we study the influence of both external and internal institutional forces on the assimilation of metrics programs in software organizations. We use previous case-based research in software metrics programs as well as prior work in institutional theory in proposing a model of metrics implementation. The theoretical model is tested on data collected through a survey from 214 metrics managers in defense-related and commercial software organizations. Our results show that external institutions, such as customers and competitors, and internal institutions, such as managers, directly influence the extent to which organizations change their internal work-processes around metrics programs. Additionally, the adaptation of work-processes leads to increased use of metrics programs in decision-making within the organization. Our research informs managers about the importance of management support and institutions in metrics programs adaptation. In addition, managers may note that the continued use of metrics information in decision-making is contingent on adapting the organization's work-processes around the metrics program. Without these investments in metrics program adaptation, the true business value in implementing metrics and software process improvement is not realized.

To produce high quality object-oriented (OO) applications, a strong emphasis on design aspects, especially during the early phases of software development, is necessary. Design metrics play an important role in helping developers understand design aspects of software and, hence, improve software quality and developer productivity. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence supporting the role of OO design complexity metrics, specifically a subset of the Chidamber and Kemerer (1991, 1994) suite (CK metrics), in determining software defects. Our results, based on industry data from software developed in two popular programming languages used in OO development, indicate that, even after controlling for the size of the software, these metrics are significantly associated with defects. In addition, we find that the effects of these metrics on defects vary across the samples from two programming languages-C++ and Java. We believe that these results have significant implications for designing high-quality software products using the OO approach.

Measurement programs in software organizations are an important source of control over quality and cost in software development. The findings of this research presented here are based on an industry-wide survey conducted to examine the factors that influence success in software metrics programs. Our approach is to go beyond the anecdotal information on metrics programs that exists in the literature and use the industry-wide survey data to rigorously test for the effects of various factors that affect metrics programs success. We measure success in metrics programs using two variables-use of metrics information in decision-making and improved organizational performance. The various determinants of metrics program success are divided into two sets-organizational variables and technical variables. The influence of these variables on metrics programs success is tested using regression analysis. Our results support some of the factors discussed in the anecdotal literature such as management support, goal alignment, and communication and feedback. Certain other factors such as metrics quality and the ease of data collection are not as strongly influential on success. We conclude the paper with a detailed discussion of our results and suggestions for future work.

In a field study conducted at a leading Fortune 100 company, we examined how having development teams reside in their own large room (an arrangement called radical collocation) affected system development. The collocated projects had significantly higher productivity and shorter schedules than both the industry benchmarks and the performance of past similar projects within the firm. The teams reported high satisfaction about their process, and both customers and project sponsors were similarly highly satisfied. The analysis of questionnaire, interview and observational data from these teams showed that being "at hand," i.e. both visible and available, helped them to coordinate their work better and learn from each other. Radical collocation seems to be one of the factors leading to high productivity in these teams.

Companies are experimenting with putting teams into warrooms, hoping for some productivity enhancement. We conducted a field study of six such teams, tracking their activity, attitudes, use of technology and productivity. Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity. Why? Among other things, teams had easy access to each other for both coordination of their work and for learning, and the work artifacts they posted on the walls remained visible to all. These results imply that if we are to truly support remote teams, we should provide constant awareness and easy transitions in and out of spontaneous meetings.

Supporting continuous media data-such as video and audio-imposes stringent demands on the retrieval performance of a multimedia server. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of data placement and retrieval algorithms to exploit the full capacity of the disks in a multimedia server. The data placement algorithm declusters every object over all of the disks in the server-using a time-based declustering unit-with the aim of balancing the disk load. As for runtime retrieval, the quintessence of the algorithm is to give each disk advance notification of the blocks that have to be fetched in the impending time periods, so that the disk can optimize its service schedule accordingly. Moreover, in processing a block request for a replicated object, the server will dynamically channel the retrieval operation to the most lightly loaded disk that holds a copy of the required block. We have implemented a multimedia server based on these algorithms. Performance tests reveal that the server achieves very high disk efficiency. Specifically, each disk is able to support up to 25 MPEG-1 streams. Moreover, experiments suggest that the aggregate retrieval capacity of the server scales almost linearly with the number of disks.

In this paper, an empirical study that links software process consistency with product defects is reported. Various measurement issues such as validity, reliability, and other challenges in measuring process consistency at the project level are discussed. A measurement scale for software process consistency is introduced. An empirical study that uses this scale to measure consistency in achieving the CMM goal questions in various key process areas (KPAs) in 45 projects at a leading software vendor is reported. The results of this analysis indicate that consistent adoption of practices specified in the CMM is associated with a lower number of defects. Even a relatively modest improvement in the consistency of implementing these practices is associated with a significant reduction in field defects.