Globalisation has come as a double-edged blade for information technology (IT) companies; providing growth opportunities and yet posing many challenges. Software development is moving from a monolithic model to a distributed approach, where many entities and organisations are involved in the development process. Risk management an important area to deal with all the kinds of technical and social issues within companies planning and programming schedules, and this new way of working requires more attention to be paid to the temporal, socio-cultural and control aspects than before. Multinational companies like IBM have begun to consider how to address the distributed nature of its projects across the globe. With outlets across the globe, the company finds various people of different cultures, languages and ethics working on a single and bigger IT projects from different locations. Other IT companies are facing the same problems, despite there being many kinds of approaches available to handle risk management in large scale IT companies. IBM commissioned the Distributed Risk Management Process (DRiMaP) model as a suitable solution. This model focused on the collaborative and on-going control aspects, and paid attention to the need for risk managers, project managers and management to include risk management into all phases of projects and the business cycle. The authors of the DRiMaP model did not subject it to extensive testing. This research sets out to evaluate, improve and extend the model process and thereby develop a new and dynamic approach to distributed information systems development. To do this, this research compares and contrasts the model with other risk management approaches. An Evolutionary Model is developed, and this is subjected to empirical testing through a hybrid constructive research approach. A survey is used to draw out the observations of project participants, a structured interview gathered the opinions of project experts, a software tool was developed to implement the model, and SysML and Monte Carlo methods were applied to this to simulate the functioning of the model. The Evolutionary Model was found to partially address the shortcomings of the DRiMaP model, and to provide a valuable platform for the development of an enterprise risk management solution.

This thesis investigates how competition effects in government procurement auction are affected by the risk distribution between the procurer and the winning bidder. The risk distribution is linked to the conditions of payment which is assumed to be largely determined by the procurer. Thus, by investigating whether competition effects are different dependent on the risk distribution, this thesis contributes to the previous literature which almost exclusively model competition effects to be determined exogenous sources of uncertainty and characteristics of the market. There is a previous literature on the effects of various payment conditions in auctions but it mostly considers ex post moral hazard issues, and not effects on the competitive behavior at the bidding stage. An econometric analysis is conducted on auctions of infrastructure construction contracts held by the Swedish Transport Administration between 2010 and 2013. The results suggest that the choice of risk distribution can shift an auction from having no competition effects in bidding to strong bid-reducing competition effects. Seemingly, the procurer appears to face a trade-off between avoiding risk and enjoying bid-reducing competition effects. The difference in competition effects between contracts with fixed and more flexible payment conditions is found to increase with the auctioned project’s expected duration. In terms of government procurement policy, the results suggest that it can be cost-efficient for the procuring entity to share the risk with the contractor in risky projects instead of avoiding risk with fixed price contracts. Whilst this may contradict some common notions regarding government procurement, it is in line with the wide use of flexible payment conditions in private-sector procurement. Arguably, the recent decade’s increased ambitions regarding innovation and sustainability in government procurement adds even further weight to these policy considerations for the risk management of procurers.