Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • 2017
  • Other Article
  • Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings

Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance

By: Alan MacCormack and Robert Lagerstrom
  • Format:Electronic
ShareBar

Abstract

The modern industrial corporation encompasses a myriad of different software applications, each of which must work in concert to deliver functionality to end-users. However, the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of competition in today’s product-markets dictates that this software portfolio be continually evolved and adapted, in order to meet new business challenges. This ability – to rapidly update, improve, remove, replace, and reimagine the software applications that underpin a firm’s competitive position – is at the heart of what has been called IT agility. Unfortunately, little work has examined the antecedents of IT agility, with respect to the choices a firm makes when designing its “Software Portfolio Architecture.”
We address this gap in the literature by exploring the relationship between software portfolio architecture and IT agility at the level of the individual applications in the architecture. In particular, we draw from modular systems theory to develop and test a series of hypotheses about how different types of coupling impact three specific dimensions of agility: the ability to update, remove and replace software applications in the firm’s portfolio. We test our hypotheses with data from a financial services firm, encompassing over 1,000 software applications and 3,000 dependencies between them. We capture data at two points in time, allowing us to identify changes in the software portfolio, and hence to develop robust measures of IT agility.

Keywords

Applications and Software; Design; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Effectiveness

Citation

MacCormack, Alan, and Robert Lagerstrom. "Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance." Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings (2017). (doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2017.297, ISSN 2151-6561.)
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Register to Read

About The Author

Alan D. MacCormack

Technology and Operations Management
→More Publications

More from the Authors

    • November–December 2022
    • Harvard Business Review

    Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now.

    By: Matthew Weinzierl, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Alan MacCormack and Brendan Rosseau
    • June 2022
    • Faculty Research

    FIELD Immersion 2022: Salt Lake City, Utah

    By: Alan MacCormack and Kerry Herman
    • 2021
    • Faculty Research

    Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2

    By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
More from the Authors
  • Your Company Needs a Space Strategy. Now. By: Matthew Weinzierl, Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Alan MacCormack and Brendan Rosseau
  • FIELD Immersion 2022: Salt Lake City, Utah By: Alan MacCormack and Kerry Herman
  • Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2 By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College