Viewing software enhancement through an organizational learning lens

Software maintenance is a large factor in the budget of most business information systems organizations, but it is an area often ignored in practitioner and research publications. Even though the need for maintenance stems from many sources, software maintenance is most frequently connected with the detection and correction of program errors. The result of this connection is that maintenance activities have a negative connotation in IS practice, and the IS practitioner literature tries to find new ways to lower the costs associated with software maintenance. These negative connotations are reflected in the research domain as maintenance research has focused almost exclusively on controlling and constraining maintenance activities.; Surveys show that a majority of software maintenance activities are dedicated to enhancing, rather than repairing, information systems. Software enhancement is used in practice to help existing systems evolve to meet the demands of a changing business environment.; This study used a case study research methodology to examine in depth software enhancement activities performed for fifteen work groups within five organizations. The study involved semi-structured interviews with both users and IS practitioners as well as observation of enhancement practices. The objective was to induce theory about the relationship between learning and software enhancement. The study found that individual learning is a factor in the need for software enhancement. Applying a learning model to software enhancements helped clarify the relationships among IS practitioners, users, information systems, and the human work activities those systems were designed to support. It was found that software enhancement is a manifestation of organizational learning since the learning from individuals is disseminated to other members of the organization when software is enhanced. Constructs affecting organizational learning during software enhancements emerged from the data and are modeled in this thesis.; It was also found that the ongoing relationship between user and IS practitioner affects the level and type of learning of an individual user. The propositions derived from the data could serve as a new approach to studying software maintenance in business organizations and may provide insight into developing more successful long-term relationships between users and IS practitioners.