Abstract

Successful software companies typically shift their organization from developing customer-specific software solutions to releasing standardized product software. This shift is called productization. It affects many internal processes and customers’ expectations. Particularly, the role-specific challenges and conflicts of software productization are mostly unattended in IS research, which motivates this paper. Based on Organizational Role Theory, the paper sheds light on the role-specific conflicts associated with changing role expectations. A case study, based on the productization transformation process of one business unit within a software company, enabled the identification of role expectations and transformation challenges. A problematization approach is employed to identify challenges of software productization from literature and our case, thereby uncovering new challenges. These are then discussed in the broader context of Organizational Role Theory.

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