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Manlu Liu ( [e-mail]) is an assistant professor of management information systems and accounting in the Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.

Sean Hansen ( [e-mail]) is an assistant professor of management information systems in the Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.

Qiang Tu ( [e-mail]) is a full professor of management information systems and an associate dean in the Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY.

© 2014 ACM 0001-0782/14/05 $15.00

which feels more like a family reunion than a professional conference.

Much of the perceived strength of the community source model is its capacity for combining platform creation and evolution in a deliberate manner (bureaucratic control) with the flexibility and innovative potential enabled by values-based collaboration and interpersonal commitment, or clan control (see Figure 2).

While commercial development is within a bureaucratic mode of control, OSSD operates largely through a mar-ket-control mechanism, augmented by elements of clan control. In the community source model, we see strong elements of both bureaucratic and clan control. In this way, community source combines significant benefits from both commercial development and OSSD, delivering the coherence and flexibility of coordination based on shared values and principles while maintaining the institutional capacity for long-term planning and directed task completion.

Community Source Development

The ultimate value of community source development is pursuit of shared value creation. The community source approach suggests a fundamental shift from the prevailing practice through which organizations invest vast amounts of talent and resources in IT without considering similar efforts among kindred institutions. Indeed, it is appropriate that higher education should be a primary proving ground for this collaborative exploration of new approaches to knowledge work.

In creating a balance between
commercial and open source de-
velopment, the community source
model inherits notable strengths and
weaknesses from the other forms.
One obvious benefit is significant
reduction in costs due to pooling re-
sources. In addition, because users
drive development of functionality,
community source participants get
solutions tailored to their needs. Re-
turning to our hypothetical university
CIO, he is no longer forced to choose
among a high-cost vendor platform
that may not be suited to his institu-
tion, a resource-sapping in-house de-
velopment effort, or an open source
solution with gaps in desired func-
tionality. By joining with like-minded
institutions in a community source
effort, his university can achieve the
functionality that addresses its needs
at a much lower cost than an isolated
development project.

The community source approach addresses the primary concerns vexing the CIO, even though concerns persist. Challenges associated with the community source model include limited access to development talent, managing levels of institutional commitment, coordinating across multiple regulatory regimes, and determination of pricing mechanisms. One particularly salient challenge in the Kuali case is the management of growth. Due to the institutionally based nature of the projects, Kuali members see the need for managing the community’s growth proactively. Unlike the organic growth of OSS projects, Kuali must attend to the ways member institutions interact as the community grows.

Our study also found that, despite its significant promise, community source development is no panacea. We are thus eager to see where community source goes in the future. There is evidence the model is taking root in industries other than higher education, 7, 20 even though questions remain around innovation and control, management of growth and evolution, and new modes of organizational interdependence. In our research, community evolution and modular design are emerging as central themes. We are thus exploring ways community source projects can employ the principles of modularity to achieve sustainability and a predictable evolutionary arc. However, as a research community, we have only scratched the surface of this novel approach to systems development.

 

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