Enabling software component reuse in enterprise software platform ecosystems

A persistent challenge for vendors who design enterprise software is to make it usable across different contexts through a process of localization. Increasingly, more vendors are adopting software platform strategies in business-to-business markets in an attempt to address this challenge, which has transitioned them into curators of ecosystems where actors collaboratively develop and commercialize a shared technology. Based on the heterogeneity of these ecosystems, localization tasks are consigned to regional implementation groups with greater experience in their native markets. One approach to localization that provides a high level of design flexibility is developing apps, but such an approach is resource-intensive. Because of this, implementation groups create other self-resourced initiatives such as software components to aid themselves. A challenge is that software components created by implementation groups to aid them during localization are not reused. As many of these implementation groups face the same challenges during localization, reusing these software components can be valuable. However, existing literature provides no prescriptive knowledge on how to accomplish this. By conducting a design science research project and collaborating with the vendor of an enterprise software platform and two implementation groups, this thesis explores developing a component management system to enable software component reuse. The practical contribution comes in the form of a component management system that enables reusing software components. The theoretical contribution from this project is four design principles regarding component management systems in enterprise software platform ecosystems: the Principle of an interface for component discovery, the Principle of component certification, the Principle of infrastructure for hosting and distribution, and the Principle of the package-to-component abstraction