Software Service Innovation Through Release Management: An Action Research Study

Abstract

Fierce competition in the market is driving software vendors to rely on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategies and to continuously match new software versions with customers’ needs and competitors’ moves. Although release management as a recurrent activity related to SaaS arguably shapes how a vendor services its customers, the literature is surprisingly limited on how software releases are managed to support SaaS strategies. Against this backdrop, we present a collaborative action-research study with Software Inc., a large multi-national software provider, in which we applied a service-dominant logic framework to improve the company’s release management process to support ongoing value co-creation with its customers. As a result, we report the practical results and experiences from Software Inc. and we provide new knowledge on how software vendors may manage releases to improve the value delivered to and co-created with their customers. This added knowledge is of interest to both practitioners and researchers as SaaS strategies increasingly shape the industry

Keywords: Software-as-Service, Service-Dominant Logic, Service Innovation, Release Management