Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case

Authors

  • Robert Lagerström KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden
  • Carliss Baldwin Harvard Business School United States
  • Alan MacCormack Harvard Business School United States

Keywords:

Design structure matrices, Software architecture, and Software application portfolio

Abstract

In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We show that the architecture of this system can be classified as a “core-periphery” system, meaning it contains a single large dominant cluster of interconnected components (the “Core”) representing 40% of the system. The system has a propagation cost of 44% and architecture flow through of 93%. This case and these findings add another piece of the puzzle suggesting that the method could be effective in uncovering the hidden structure in software portfolio architectures.

Author Biographies

  • Robert Lagerström, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Sweden

    Robert Lagerström is Associate Professor in Industrial Information Systems Architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm Sweden. He is also a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School. Robert’s topics of interest include Enterprise Architecture, software applications modifiability and complexity, and cyber security. He is responsible for the IT Management with Enterprise Architecture education at KTH. In addition to that he supervises PhD students and master thesis projects. Robert has written more than 50 academic publications (journals, conferences, and workshops), also he is a co-author of thebook IT Management with Enterprise Architecture. Robert is one of the founders and board members of the KTH spin-off company foreseeti AB, where he also works as an expert. Foreseeti developsand sells an “IT CAD Tool” for proactive cyber security management.

  • Carliss Baldwin, Harvard Business School United States

    Carliss Baldwin is the William l. White Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She studies the process of design and the impact of design architecture on firm strategy,platforms and business ecosystems. With Kim Clark, she authored Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity. Her work has been published in a variety of leading journals including Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Research Policy and Harvard Business Review. She has won numerous awards for research, and was awarded a Doctor honoris causa by the Technical University Munich in 2014. Carliss teaches Finance 2, an MBA Required-Curriculum course in corporate finance. Before teaching Finance 2, she developed and taught an Elective course on Mergers & Acquistions. She has written over 50 cases and notes for MBA classes. In 2014,her case on Roche’s Acquisition of Genentech was named the best case in Finance, Accounting and Control by the Case Centre. Carliss has a Doctorate and MBA from Harvard Business School, and an SBin Economics from MIT. She studied finance under Robert C. Merton,Franco Modigliani, and John Lintner.

  • Alan MacCormack, Harvard Business School United States

    Alan MacCormack is the MBA Class of 1949 Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His research examines the management of innovation, technology and new product development in high-technology industries,with a particular focus on the software sector. Alan’s research has been published in a variety of leading journals including Management Science, Research Policy and Harvard Business Review. In addition, he has written over 50 cases and notes that explore how organizations like Intel, Microsoft and NASA effectively manage innovation. Alan currently teaches FIELD, a new MBA course that develops students’ teamwork and leadership abilities through solving real world problems in small project-based teams. In 2013, he received the Greenhill Award, forhis role in developing this course. Alan holds a DBA from Harvard Business School, an MSc from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a BSc from the University of Bath in England.

References

Baldwin, C. and Clark, K. 2000. Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity. MIT Press.

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Lagerström, R., Baldwin, C., MacCormack, A., & Dreyfus, D. 2014b. Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Flexibility Analysis. Risk and change management in complex systems: Proceedings of the 16th International DSM Conference.

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Published

2022-05-20

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2015): The Journal of Modern Project Management

Section

Articles-JMPM

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Robert Lagerström, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case. (2022). The Journal of Modern Project Management, 3(2), 146. https://journalmodernpm.com/manuscript/index.php/jmpm/article/view/191

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