duction and service-dominant logic. Prior life-cycle models are inadequate—mostly mute—on the concerns of crowdsourcing, super-linear growth, and change as a constant. While the Metropolis Model is not a life-cycle model, it does offer new ways to think about how a new breed of system can be developed; its principles help management shift to new project-management styles that take advantage of the “wisdom of crowds.” The wrong model or a misaligned model can mean disaster for an organization. The right model—possibly requiring substantial organizational and technological reengineering—provides significant new opportunity. For example, IBM (the most patent-productive company in the world) now makes more money from crowdsourced OSS-related services than from all its patent-protected intellectual property, ⁴ even though the shift to OSS was turbulent and controversial within IBM.

The Metropolis Model provides a framework within which organizations are able to reason about all aspects of how they create systems, including tool support, languages, training, resource allocation and management, and personal motivation. The principles of the Metropolis Model are useful as a critical set of questions for examining the alignment of system-development activities with the underlying business model. Business-model questions come first: Who are our customers? What value can be co-created by and for them? What motivation can I offer to engage them for the long term? Answers prompt a new set of system-development questions: How can customer participation be engaged? How can the infrastructure be bifurcated? What technological or system competency must be developed to facilitate engagement and custodianship of the system? What policies must be established to safeguard the community? To answer, organizations must identify the characteristics of their systems and reconsider their business and development models.

Metropolis Model concepts are not appropriate for all forms of development. Smaller systems with limited scope will continue to benefit from the conceptual integrity that accompanies small, cohesive teams. High-security

and safety-critical systems and systems built around protected intellectual property will continue to be built in traditional ways for the foreseeable future. But more and more crowdsourcing, mashups, open source, and other forms of nontraditional development are being harnessed for value co-creation. The Metropolis Model speaks to all of them. For example, mashups are beginning to be observed and supported even in the extremely conservative financial sphere. ⁶

Embracing the Metropolis Model requires dramatic changes to accepted software-engineering practices. Organizations must be prepared to adopt new organizational structures, processes, and tools to support these changes. Each Metropolis principle is, to some degree, counterintuitive relative to existing software-engineering practices. Management must therefore guard against old habits and foster a new mindset to deal with unknown people in open teams, embrace incomplete requirements, accept sufficient correctness, and anticipate and tolerate emergent behavior.

Much more research is needed to understand and capitalize on the relatively new form of commons-based peer production. We offer the Metropolis Model as a foundation on which subsequent research and life-cycle models can be built.

 

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Rick Kazman ( [e-mail]) is a professor in the Department of Information Technology Management in the Shidler College of Business at the University of hawaii, honolulu, hI, and a visiting scientist at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

Hong-Mei Chen ( [e-mail]) is a professor of IT management in the Department of Information Technology Management in the Shidler College of Business at the University of hawaii at Manoa, honolulu, hI.

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