AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Information system development (ISD) is a knowledge intensive process and is being taken as a socialize cross-disciplines collaboration that not only brings up innovations, but also create competitive advantage of the organization. However, different layers of knowledge boundaries (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) arise with the knowledge diversity of the ISD project and further lowers the project performance and product quality in corresponding aspects. To solve the problems, we follow a construct development methodology to empirically identify the critical knowledge boundary spanning (KBS) processes, roles and objects for different layers of knowledge boundary, examine their influences to the effectiveness of corresponding KBS, and further assess the direct and moderating relationships from KBS effectiveness to project performance and product quality all through a questionnaire survey. Our findings highlights the support of syntactic and semantic KBS effectiveness to pragmatic KBS effectiveness on directly or moderately enlarge its effects on project performance, and their direct influences on product quality and project performance. Also, eighteen processes, seven roles and ten objects are identified as critical KBS activities that have significant influences on corresponding layers of the KBS effectiveness. For academic applications, we not only split up the layers of KBS effectiveness and examine their direct and moderating effects to ISD performance, but also offer categorized KBS activities under a formal construct development methodology for future studies. For practical implications, we offer a model for ISD team members to refer to for solving their knowledge boundary issues and increase their project performance and product quality.