Heterogeneity in IT Landscapes and Monopoly Power of Firms: A Model to Quantify Heterogeneity

The term "heterogeneity" is widely used to describe complex IT systems and can refer to various characteristics, such as vendor, technology, or semantic diversity of the systems components. However, no commonly accepted definition or quantification of this “diversity” can be found in IS literature. In this article we transfer well-studied measures from other disciplines (especially economics and the anti-monopoly legislation) to heterogeneity in IT landscapes. The two main contributions of this article are A) the definition of heterogeneity in an IT landscape as a statistical property – which therefore can be measured by statistical indexes and B) a generic approach to quantify heterogeneity in IT landscapes. The applicability of the conceptualization and the approach to quantify heterogeneity is demonstrated in two real IT organizations.