IS Alignment Improved with Co-Evolutionary Principles: An Open Source Approach

Despite extensive research, results on the sources, components and mechanisms to create or sustain information systems (IS) alignment are still lacking. The quest for an IS alignment remains a critical unsolved problem. In an attempt to address this situation, we present and test a comprehensive theoretical model in an OSS context. We explain how IS alignment at the individual level between the Open source system (OSS) project performance and open source developer´s activity level is improved. We integrate the co-evolutionary theory (adaptive tension, change rate and modular design) to understand how IS alignment is improved. This study is based on data gathered from over 750 open source projects developing enterprise applications on sourceforge.net over one year. The results support all the hypotheses and we conclude that use of the co-evolutionary theory will better help IS alignment in an OSS context.