Papers by Yossi Lichtenstein
Journal of Information Technology
Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owne... more Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owners and third-party developers that underlie digital innovation in platform ecosystems. While boundary resources that are owned by open-source communities and small-scale software vendors are also critical components in the digital infrastructure, their role in digital innovation has yet to be systematically explored. In particular, software libraries are popular boundary resources that provide functionality without the need for continued interaction with their owners. They are used extensively by commercial vendors to enable customization of their software products, by communities to disseminate open-source software, and by big-tech platform owners to provide functionality that does not involve control. This article reports on the deployment of such software libraries in the web and mobile (Android) contexts by 107 start-up companies in London. Our findings show that libraries owned by b...
MIS Quarterly
University. His current research interests focus on using real-option techniques to evaluate info... more University. His current research interests focus on using real-option techniques to evaluate information technology (IT) investments and managing their risk in an IT portfolio context, as well as on designing declarative ontology-centered modeling formalisms for programming-free development of information systems. He has published in a variety of outlets, including
Business Familiarity as Risk Mitigation in Software Development Outsourcing Contracts
MIS Quarterly
... 51-90. 26. Anandasivam Gopal , Tridas Mukhopadhyay , Mayuram S. Krishnan, The role of softwar... more ... 51-90. 26. Anandasivam Gopal , Tridas Mukhopadhyay , Mayuram S. Krishnan, The role of software processes and communication in offshore software development, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.4, April 2002. 27. Anandasivam ...
Journal of Global Operations and Strategic Sourcing
Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the conte... more Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the context of software development projects that allows firms to align design flexibility with design uncertainty at the project level. The theoretical lenses of contract theory and software engineering are used to explain why the five archetypes in the proposed typology provide gradually increasing levels of design flexibility and to develop hypotheses about the associations between design flexibility and a set of project cost dimensions. Design/methodology/approach The hypotheses are tested with objective contractual data from 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank over a period of three years. Findings Data analysis confirms the existence of the proposed typology and shows that design flexibility is negatively associated with control and positively associated with coordination, trust, duration and price. Research limitations/implications Although the f...
Communications of the Association for Information Systems
This material is brought to you by the Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been ac... more This material is brought to you by the Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in Communications of the Association for Information Systems by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected].
MIS Quarterly
This paper examines multiple contract design choices in the context of transaction and relational... more This paper examines multiple contract design choices in the context of transaction and relational attributes and consequent ex ante and ex post transaction costs. It focuses on two understudied themes in the IT outsourcing literature. First, while the literature is predominantly concerned with opportunism and consequent ex post hazard costs that contracts can safeguard against, parties to a contract also economize on ex ante transaction costs by their choice of contract type and contract extensiveness. Second, the literature studies the aggregate extensiveness of contracts rather than of distinct contract functions: safeguarding, coordination, and adaptability. Against this backdrop, our research model portrays a nuanced picture that is anchored in the following theoretical interpretation: transaction and relational attributes have implications on specific ex ante and ex post transaction costs, and these implications can be balanced by respective choices in both contract type and the extensiveness of specific contract functions. These two contract design choices complement and substitute for each other in their ability to economize on specific transaction costs. Our analysis of 210 software development outsourcing contracts finds that explanatory power increases when analyzing the extensiveness of individual contract functions rather than the aggregate contract extensiveness, highlighting subtle competing influences that are otherwise masked by an aggregate measure. Our analysis also shows that a preference for time-and-material contracts counteracts the effect of certain transaction attributes on contract extensiveness, and even cancels it out in the case of transaction uncertainty.
Proceedings 41st Design Automation Conference 2004, Feb 1, 2004
We report on our experience with a new test generation language for processor verification. The v... more We report on our experience with a new test generation language for processor verification. The verification of two superscalar multiprocessors is described and we show the ease of expressing complex verification tasks. The cost and benefit are demonstrated: training takes up to six months; the simulation time required for a desired level of coverage has decreased by a factor of twenty; the number of escape bugs has been reduced.
Real Options Analysis is Entirely Appropriate for Evaluating Uncertain It Investments
Abstract Business and information systems (IS) executives continue to grapple with the issue of u... more Abstract Business and information systems (IS) executives continue to grapple with the issue of uncertainty in evaluating IT investments. Despite the use of net present value and other techniques, executives are often forced to resort to a gut decision. Real options analysis ...
Big Data Business Models: Exploring Business Model Choices in an Embryonic Industry
Concurrent algorithmic debugging
Acm Sigplan Notices, Jan 3, 1989
Algorithmic Debugging is a theory of debugging that uses queries on the compositional semantics o... more Algorithmic Debugging is a theory of debugging that uses queries on the compositional semantics of a program in order to localize bugs. It uses the following principle: if a computation of a program's component gives an incorrect result, while all the subcomputations it invokes compute correct results, then the code of this component is erroneous. Algorithmic Debugging is applied, in this work, to reactive systems, in particular to programs written in Flat Concurrent Prolog (FCP). Debugging reactive systems is known to be more difficult than the debugging of functional systems. A functional system is fully described by the relation between its initial input and final output; this context-freedom is used in debugging. A reactive system continuously responds to external inputs, thus its debugging cannot make use of context-free input/output relations. Given a compositional semantic model for a concurrent programming language, we demonstrate how one can directly apply the ideas of Algorithmic Debugging to obtain a theory of program debugging for the considered language. The conflict between the context-freedom of input/ output relations and the reactive nature of concurrent systems is resolved by using semantic objects which record the reactive nature of the system's components. In functional algorithmic debugging the queries relate to input/output relations; in concurrent algorithmic debugging the queries refer to semantic objects called processes which capture the reactive nature of FCP computations. A diagnosis algorithm for incorrect FCP programs is proposed. The algorithm gets an erroneous computation and using queries isolates an erroneous clause or an incomplete procedure. An FCP implementation of the diagnosis algorithm demonstrates the usefulness as well as the difficulties of Algorithmic Debugging of FCP programs.
Representation and enumeration of flat Concurrent Prolog computations
Concurrent Prolog Collected Papers, Feb 1, 1988
Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 1991
PA-RISC is Hewlett-Packard's (HP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture that is us... more PA-RISC is Hewlett-Packard's (HP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture that is used in its high-performance computer systems (Mahon et al. 1986). Implementations of this architecture have produced some of the most complex processor boards that HP makes (Robinson et al. 1987; Gassman et al. 1987): They can contain as many as 8 very large scale integrated (VLSI) chips-most of them custom, from central processing units to bus controllers to floating-point processors-several high-speed random-access memory arrays, one or more high-speed buses with over 100 lines, and many other components. In large part because of this complexity, the testing of PA-RISC processor boards became a bottleneck, resulting in an undesirable backlog of undiagnosed boards, growing at a rate of 10 percent each month.
Milestones as Response to Risk in Software Development Contracts-An Empirical
European Conference on Information Systems, 2002
The IS research literature has tested the applicability of option pricing models to IS projects m... more The IS research literature has tested the applicability of option pricing models to IS projects mostly through detailed case studies. The current study complements this literature by considering a wide set of IS projects and assessing, albeit crudely, their optional value. We test the literature's assumption that IS projects embed significant optional value. Our research site is a European plant of a leading multinational manufacturer of sophisticated products. The portfolio of current and recent IS projects is studied through a questionnaire administered to all project managers. Seventeen project managers were interviewed concerning thirty-one projects with median cost of $325k and median benefit of $1.2m. We find strong support to the prediction that IS projects include considerable optional value. The thirty one projects we studied embed forty seven options, many of them with benefits comparable to the value of the original projects. Only four projects had no optional value. A comparison between a subset of the portfolio and the corresponding scale-up options shows that the exercise price of the options is 20% of the original projects' cost, and that the value of these options is about 70% of the original projects' value. This data also demonstrates the large return, of scale-up options-the median return is 1500%, five fold the median return of projects. The main practical implication of this study is that real option evaluation is useful for IS projects in general, and should not be confined to special cases. A further implication is that real option thinking may be of particular value in recognising reduction and deferral options. The project managers in our study found such options difficult to identify and considered their time to expiration as relatively short. Proactive management of reduction and deferral options should thus increase the flexibility and value of IS projects. * We wish to thank Michel Benaroch and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments.
In this paper we set out to demonstrate that the traditional approach to risk management is based... more In this paper we set out to demonstrate that the traditional approach to risk management is based on a flawed assumption regarding the objectivity of risk. Risk management is generally seen as a possible remedy for the frequent failure of ISD efforts. The idea behind traditional risk management is that risk factors must first be identified and evaluated, then eliminated
Representation and enumeration of fcp computations
Contract Choice in Software Development Outsourcing: a Multidimensional View of Project Attributes
Abstract Recently, there is a growing interest in the contractual mechanisms that govern software... more Abstract Recently, there is a growing interest in the contractual mechanisms that govern software development outsourcing (SDO). Studies on SDO frequently draw their predictive power from the identification of project attributes that explain why firms choose either fixed ...
Designing Scalable Digital Business Models
Advances in Strategic Management, 2015
2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07), 2007
Although services are the main growth engine in modern economies, there is evidence that new serv... more Although services are the main growth engine in modern economies, there is evidence that new service development practices are ineffective. In this exploratory study, we look at the organizational roles that participate in the different stages of service innovation. We expect to find multiple roles in the creation, development and deployment of innovation in services. We suggest that this fuzziness of the locus of innovation may explain some of the difficulties in service innovation. We interviewed six senior executives in European service organizations about their recent major innovations. The data on twenty five innovations, support our main expectation that service innovation involves many organizational roles and typically aggregates more functions as the innovation process progresses. We find also that customers and customer facing functions are not central to innovation, that R&D and Business Development do not create but mostly develop innovations, and that top executives participate in the creation of new services and processes.
Enterprise Information Systems, 2015
The effective deployment of enterprise systems has been a major challenge for many organizations.... more The effective deployment of enterprise systems has been a major challenge for many organizations. Customizing the new system, changing business processes, and integrating multiple information sources are all difficult tasks. As such, they are typically done in carefully planned stages in a process known as phased implementation. Using ideas from option theory, this paper critiques aspects of phased implementation. One customer relationship management (CRM) project and its phased implementation are described in detail and ten other enterprise system deployments are summarized as a basis for the observation that almost all deployment stages are pre-defined operational steps rather than decision points. However, option theory suggests that optional stages, to be used only when risk materializes, should be integral parts of project plans. Although such optional stages are often more valuable than pre-defined stages, the evidence presented in this paper shows that they are only rarely utilized. Therefore, a simple framework is presented; it first identifies risks related to the deployment of enterprise systems, then identifies optional stages that can mitigate these risks, and finally compares the costs and benefits of both pre-defined and optional stages.
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Papers by Yossi Lichtenstein