Although formal control in teams is often conceptualized as manager-imposed, recent literature suggests that teams can enact formal control themselves through codified, mandatory, and repeatable practices. We argue that agile practices such as iterative delivery, retrospective review, and automated testing function as team-managed formal controls (TMFC), distinct from traditional managerial controls. Drawing on configurational control theory and the enabling versus authoritative control lens, we examine behavioral (BC), output (OC), and emergent outcome control (EOC) alongside TMFC and test their associations with agile project success. Using multilevel modeling with 344 respondents across 57 agile teams, we find that enabling controls (EOC, TMFC) are positively associated with perceived solution impacts and TMFC is consistently associated with perceived solution quality. Output control is positively associated with solution impacts but not quality, and behavioral control shows no positive associations with either outcome. We also find a negative interaction between TMFC and BC: When both are strongly present, the positive association between team-managed practices and outcomes is effectively zero, suggesting these control logics conflict when co-enacted. Decomposing TMFC reveals that iterative delivery drives the positive main effect, whereas automated testing is the primary locus of conflict with BC. Team-level, project-level, and subscale-level analyses confirm these findings. Our findings extend configurational control theory by introducing TMFC as a distinct enabling mechanism, revealing the differential roles of specific practices, and identifying a conflict between team-managed and behavioral control not observed with output or emergent outcome control.

Although agile methodologies prescribe various practices, they universally focus on obtaining feedback. Agile practitioners argue that this feedback allows teams to better adapt to uncertainty, which can lead to increases in software quality. Using a sample of 76 agile teams across multiple organizations, we investigate the impacts of agile feedback practices of technical feedback, fast iterative delivery, and agile project management on software quality. Also, we investigate interaction effects between agile feedback practice use and six different sub-constructs of uncertainty. We find that a higher level of use of some agile feedback practices directly impacts software quality and moderates the effects of uncertainty on software quality. However, we find a more complex relationship between agile methodologies and software quality than previously identified. These findings illustrate future research opportunities into the complicated relationship between agile methodology usage and external environmental factors.

Although prior research has frequently focused on aggregate IT capital, most firms invest in specific types with different goals. Each type of capital represents a distinct factor of a firm’s production function. Drawing on a theory-of-production framework, we disaggregate overall IT capital into specific types to examine their unique effects on firm performance over time. We categorize these IT-specific production factors into a firm’s installed personal computers for individual information access, servers for collective information access, storage capacity for information stock, and nodes for information flow. We investigate when and how each IT capital type contributes to firm performance by analyzing the 5-year panel data of 1,548 US firms. Our findings show that individual information access capital and collective information access capital have immediate effects on profitability through cost efficiency or sales growth. By contrast, information stock capital has a lagged effect on profitability. In addition, information stock capital complements individual information access capital in improving profitability, as well as contributing to sales growth and cost efficiency equivalent to firm size. These results extend the existing research on firm-level effects of IT investments by demonstrating that different IT capital effects have unique ways of affecting firm performance.

In response to Österle et al.'s ‘Memorandum on Design Oriented Information Systems Research’, this commentary disputes, and expands the context of, several premises used to justify the main argument in the memorandum. These include: (1) claims about the evolution and role of design science research in the broader IS community and its position in the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon community’, (2) the journal reviewing standards applied to design science research and what is perceived to be a sole focus on behavioral ‘descriptive’ research in certain IS journals. This commentary also discusses how such journals operate and set up their missions, review principles, and standards.