Leveraging Intellectual Capital in DevOps for Achieving Competitive Advantage

Organizational learning is crucial for companies to stay competitive, especially if they decide to transform their established IT functions and integrate new forms of collaboration, such as DevOps teams. This leads to significant challenges in training and educating team members but also in setting up a performance-oriented team. Hence, we used the theoretical lenses of intellectual capital and organizational learning to explain how ambidextrous learning is achieved in DevOps teams. Accordingly, we conducted a qualitative case study with a four-month observation and expert interviews. Based on our findings, we derived 21 subcategories along the intellectual capital perspectives of human, social, and organizational capital. Our findings show that DevOps teams need to balance the characteristics of intellectual capital dimensions to outperform. This study contributes to academic understanding by empirically investigating the intellectual capital and organizational learning research stream. IT managers should benefit from applying our findings when developing their teams.