Organizational Culture and ISD Practices: Comparative Literature Review

This chapter reports results from a study that aims to analyze and compare the literature related to custom IS, packaged, and open source software organizational cultures, and their systems development practices. The comparative analysis is performed using a framework for organizational culture as lenses to the literature. Our study suggests that the beliefs and values of these three communities of practice differ remarkably and make their organizational culture and systems development practices different. The most important differences were found in business milieu, ISD team efforts, ISD approaches, and products and quality. Based on the study we can question the widely held wisdom of methods, techniques, and tools in systems development and managing its efforts. Our study has several implications for research and practice, which are discussed in this chapter.