Un-official projects resulting from unsanctioned, bottom-up employee initiatives is a phenomenon that can cause serious resource planning problems in IT project portfolio management, such as when resources thought to be available have actually been spent on projects conducted under the radar. At the same time, such project may also give rise to innovative ideas, solutions and software of potentially great benefit to organizations. Previous research has begun to acknowledge and highlight the innovative potential in bottom-up un-official activities, but little is known about why individual professionals engage in un-official projects. We draw on psychological empowerment and constructive deviance theory to explain such engagement, identifying factors fostering empowerment as well as factors moderating whether empowerment translates into unofficial project activities. Our conceptual model contributes to the theoretical discourse on un-official projects and equips practitioners with knowledge that can help them balance the propensity of individuals to engage in un-official activities.

Owing to the increasing regulatory pressure and the need for aligned IT decisions, governance of IT has become important for both academia and practice. However, knowledge that integrates the determinants and consequences of IT governance success remains scarce. Although some studies investigate single aspects of IT governance success and its impact, none of these combine these factors into a comprehensive and integrated model. To address this gap, our research aims at understanding what factors influence and result from successful IT governance, and at determining how they can be translated into a model to explain IT governance success and its impact. Therefore, we conducted 28 interviews in 19 companies across different industries. Based on the analysis, we present a model that helps understanding what factors make IT governance successful and how IT governance contributes to an IT …

Recent market developments such as increasing digitalization of services, professionalization of customers, and transparency about the specific value of IT services, are putting IT consulting firms as well as their customers under pressure. Thus, it is of high importance that IT consultancies and their customers are jointly working together to innovate new services and solve specific tasks which come along with the digitization of services. Although previous literature offers valuable starting points for explaining such collaborative value creation, we do not see specific approaches that comprehensively address this challenge. By drawing upon the service-dominant logic as the theoretical frame, we deductively develop a conceptual model that explains the emergence of cocreated value within IT consulting relationships. After a thorough empirical validation of our model, our ultimate contribution will be a theory that equips IT consulting firms and their customers with information to better understand the drivers of co-created value.

Un-enacted projects are those projects that have not been officially evaluated by the project portfolio management but do exist although they are not known to a company's project portfolio. As a consequence, resources thought to be available often prove to be actually unavailable and that unofficial initiatives eventually compete for scarce resources. One particular type of these un-enacted projects are bottom-up initiatives. Bottom-up un-enacted projects are unofficial initiatives on which employees spend time without order but with which they intend to benefit their organizations. While previous research highlights the great potential of bottom-up un-enacted projects, they only focus on the individual level but leave the organizational level for further research. To address this research gap, this study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of the organizational drivers of bottom-up un-enacted projects. We draw on deviance theory to develop a conceptual model for explaining the occurrence of these projects. In order to triangulate the emerging model with insights from practice, we use interview data to cross-check and refine the theory-driven model. Our results advance the theoretical discourse on the concept of un-enacted projects and enable practitioners to understand the levers with which to steer respective activities in the intended direction.

Customers may step out of their expected ‘role behavior’ to engage in ‘citizenship behaviours’. This role- change provides emotional and instrumental benefits to service employees (SEs). Although past research has acknowledged the veracity of this interesting phenomenon, the customers’ motivations and expectations for performing supportive actions that explicitly benefit service personnel remain unclear. This paper investigates both fundamental sources of such customer behaviours.