Toward Proprietary Software Ecosystem Governance Strategies Based on Health Metrics
Luiz Alexandre Costa, Awdren Fontão, Rodrigo Pereira dos Santos · IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management · 2021
The first approaches to conceptualizing software ecosystems (SECO) appeared more than 15 years ago, and few studies have addressed proprietary SECO. In a proprietary SECO, organizations are concerned with keeping their assets protected by intellectual property. We first report on a longitudinal literature study to understand how the governance mechanisms work and organizations handle incidents in SECOs, updating a previous systematic literature review covering from 2006 to 2015 with new studies from 2016 to 2020. Next, we investigated the governance mechanisms in a proprietary SECO of a large international organization through a participative case study. Moreover, we gathered information on governance in practice and defined strategies to implement governance mechanisms measured by health metrics, as follows: 1)observation:analyzing the behavior of the participants in the face of problematic situations; 2)interviews:collecting participants’ information on the adoption of governance mechanisms; and 3)opinion survey:verifying the level of participants’ perception about the new strategies related to proprietary SECO governance mechanisms. Based on the results, we derived practical implications and contributions to provide a research agenda for academics and practitioners, such as workforce capacity planning in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market.