Toward Proprietary Software Ecosystem Governance Strategies Based on Health Metrics

The first approaches to conceptualizing software ecosystems (SECO) appeared more than 15 years ago, and few studies have addressed proprietary SECO. In a proprietary SECO, organizations are concerned with keeping their assets protected by intellectual property. We first report on a longitudinal literature study to understand how the governance mechanisms work and organizations handle incidents in SECOs, updating a previous systematic literature review covering from 2006 to 2015 with new studies from 2016 to 2020. Next, we investigated the governance mechanisms in a proprietary SECO of a large international organization through a participative case study. Moreover, we gathered information on governance in practice and defined strategies to implement governance mechanisms measured by health metrics, as follows: 1) observation: analyzing the behavior of the participants in the face of problematic situations; 2) interviews: collecting participants’ information on the adoption of governance mechanisms; and 3) opinion survey: verifying the level of participants’ perception about the new strategies related to proprietary SECO governance mechanisms. Based on the results, we derived practical implications and contributions to provide a research agenda for academics and practitioners, such as workforce capacity planning in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market.