The Impact of Collaboration Network Structure on Issue Tracking´s Process Efficiency at a Large Business Software Vendor

Researchers in the IS domain have addressed communication structure and its effect on performance. While early research focused on small networks and utilized sociometric surveys, recent works have concentrated on electronic data sources provided by open source software repositories. Surprisingly, software vendors have less frequently been studied despite their need for continuous enhancement of organizational design. In this study, we analyze a global business software vendor by utilizing existing data sources. We investigate the association of both collaboration network centrality and communication with process efficiency. Despite coping with complex, interweaved processes and social networks, we find that communication, centrality in the large case-study-wide network, and communication pattern homogeneity are positively associated with process efficiency. However, centrality in small work groups slows the analyzed issue tracking process down, possibly due to increased overhead and bottleneck effects that become visible when looking at single issues qualitatively.