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Assessing the relative contribution of the facets of agility to distributed systems development success: an Analytic Hierarchy Process approach

  • Original Article
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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Recent studies have sought to identify different types/facets of agility that can potentially contribute to distributed Information Systems Development (ISD) project success. However, prior research has not attempted to assess the relative importance of the various types of agility with respect to different ISD success measures. We believe that such an assessment is critical, since this information can enable organizations to direct scarce organizational resources to the types of agility that are most relevant. To this end, we use the Analytic Hierarchy Process to unearth, from the perspectives of two stakeholder groups of distributed software development projects, managers, and technical staff members, as to which agility facets facilitate (and to what degree) on-time completion of projects and effective collaboration in distributed ISD teams. Furthermore, noting that there is a need for an overall set of prioritized agility facets (by integrating managerial and technically oriented perspectives), we present three ways to aggregate the preferences of the two groups.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, College of Business, Washington State University, U.S.A.

    Saonee Sarker

  2. Department of Management and Operations, College of Business, Washington State University, U.S.A.

    Charles L Munson

  3. Center for Applied Information and Communication Technology, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

    Suprateek Sarker

  4. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Jess and Mildred Fisher College of Science and Mathematics, Towson University, U.S.A.

    Suranjan Chakraborty

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  1. Saonee Sarker
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  2. Charles L Munson
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  3. Suprateek Sarker
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  4. Suranjan Chakraborty
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Correspondence to Saonee Sarker.

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Sarker, S., Munson, C., Sarker, S. et al. Assessing the relative contribution of the facets of agility to distributed systems development success: an Analytic Hierarchy Process approach. Eur J Inf Syst 18, 285–299 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2009.25

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