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Human Sustainability in Software Development
Abstract
Human thriving and outsourcing can go hand in hand. This research aims to outline outsourcing approaches for facilitating human thriving by conducting a semi-systematic literature review. We identified three outsourcing approaches that consider corporate social responsibility: impact sourcing, ethical outsourcing, and Fair Trade Software. The aim of this research is to understand the effect of these approaches on marginalized people, and the benefits and challenges for client organizations. The following main conclusions are drawn. First, impact sourcing provides marginalized people with the opportunity to generate an income, to develop themselves professionally, and to build a social circle. In some cases it can generate harmful impacts such as stress. Second, the benefits of impact sourcing for client organizations compared to traditional outsourcing are reduced costs, reduced employee turnover, improved corporate social responsibility, and new chances for growth. Third, ethical outsourcing protects brand image and can improve stakeholder management. However, the extra investments required may reduce competitiveness. Last, Fair Trade Software is a relatively new model, and therefore the benefits and challenges have yet to be assessed. A potential benefit is capacity building by knowledge transfer and network strengthening. Currently some of the biggest challenges are the lack of audits, caused by a lack of resources, and increasing the adoption rate of this outsourcing model.
... Employees gain management skills such as time management, conflict management, and problem-solving [18,23,24,31]. In addition, informational, technical, and language skills are often improved through offered training [17,18,25,32,39,41,43]. However, the most considerable improvement brought by Impact Sourcing is the economic benefits such as stable income to spend on further education and healthcare, along with financial independence from family [17,18,32,39,43]. ...
... In addition, informational, technical, and language skills are often improved through offered training [17,18,25,32,39,41,43]. However, the most considerable improvement brought by Impact Sourcing is the economic benefits such as stable income to spend on further education and healthcare, along with financial independence from family [17,18,32,39,43]. In particular, women from rural regions profit by working for an ISSP. ...
... Overall, women feel more empowered [17,21,25,39]. However, in some cases, the employment of women from rural regions causes family-internal relationship problems as women begin to earn more money than men, who are viewed as the breadwinners in their society [18,32,43]. Furthermore, employees gain more self-confidence and communication skills [17,25,32]. ...
Impact Sourcing is the outsourcing of activities to disadvantaged social groups in order to help them become participants of the globalized digital world and thus benefit from higher incomes and wealth creation. Firms started using this approach in the early 2010s to contribute to their Corporate Social Responsibility goals. Empirical, mainly qualitative, research in the form of case studies has documented the achieved advantages and challenges faced. Our paper provides a systematic literature review of these studies. It consolidates the extant research findings along five involved stakeholder groups—impact sourcing providers, involved employees, their social communities, the outsourcing clients, and the government—and identifies avenues for future research.
In large-scale agile projects, product owners undertake a range of challenging and varied activities beyond those conventionally associated with that role. Using in-depth research interviews from 93 practitioners working in cross-border teams, from 21 organisations, our rich empirical data offers a unique international perspective into product owner activities. We found that the leaders of large-scale agile projects create product owner teams. Product owner team members undertake sponsor, intermediary and release plan master activities to manage scale. They undertake communicator and traveller activities to manage distance and technical architect, governor and risk assessor activities to manage governance. Based on our findings, we describe product owner behaviors that are valued by experienced product owners and their line managers.
This paper presents and interprets the results of an industry association survey
regarding the role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Global IT Outsourcing.
The survey is conducted bi-annually by the International Association of Outsourcing
Professionals (IAOP). Interpretations of the survey findings are used to articulate
directions and models for outsourcing industry CSR initiatives, published in the IAOP
Guide to Corporate Responsibility. Both CSR and Outsourcing continue to grow in
importance in the global economy. This paper examines the trends of organizations
that buy and provide outsourcing services and how CSR will become more important
in future outsourcing contracts. The motivation for this research is to understand the
social responsibility issues that providers should address to satisfy expectations of
buyers of outsourcing services.
The Agile project management methodology has been widely used in recent years as a means to counter the dangers of traditional, front-end planning methods that often lead to downstream development pathologies. Although numerous authors have pointed to the advantages of Agile, with its emphasis on individuals and interactions over processes, customer collaboration over contracts and formal negotiations, and responsiveness over rigid planning, there are, to date, very few large-scale, empirical studies to support the contention that Agile methods can improve the likelihood of project success. Developed originally for software development, it is still predominantly an IT phenomenon. But due to its success it has now spread to non-IT projects. Using a data sample of 1002 projects across multiple industries and countries, we tested the effect of Agile use in organizations on two dimensions of project success: efficiency and overall stakeholder satisfaction against organizational goals. We further examined the moderating effects of variables such as perceived quality of the vision/goals of the project, project complexity, and project team experience. Our findings suggest that Agile methods do have a positive impact on both dimensions of project success. Further, the quality of the vision/goals is a marginally significant moderator of this effect. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.
Experts suggest that information technology impact sourcing is a new approach that clients can take when they outsource IT-related work to base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) suppliers. Supply of IT work from the base of the pyramid is growing as diffusion of digital technology and attendant skills become universal. BoP supply would mean drawing IT workers from communities in developing countries averaging income levels of less than $2.50 per person per day. Clients can select from a continuum of approaches to BoP outsourcing. The key impact sourcing players involved in this approach are clients, intermediaries, and suppliers. Intermediaries work across borders, bringing a developmental dimension to IT offshoring. The sharp end of impact sourcing lies with the suppliers, the base-of-the-pyramid workers who deliver the IT services and who live in developing countries.
Abstract Global,software ,development ,has ,become ,an extremely important issue for organizations at present in the climate of increasing ,tendency towards globalization and global outsourcing. A number ,of studies have been conducted,which ,have ,identified a set ,of problematic areas which are common across projects, including language and cultural differences, trust factors, communication across temporal and spatial distances, lack of shared contextual awareness. This study of global software development ,at Analog ,Devices Inc. (ADI) is especially noteworthy for a number of reasons. Firstly, the project has recently moved ,from a co-located ,to a globally-distributed one, and thus the team had already had experience of being co-located, a factor that has not typically been the case in the ,studies published to date where,teams ,are ,being ,established ,who ,have ,not previously been co-located. Also, as language and cultural factors were not an issue, the study was able to focus on the ,problems ,of communication, over ,temporal and,spatial distances. The study discusses how ,ADI attempted,to address ,these problems ,and identifies the initiatives that worked well, and, more importantly, those that did not work as well. Among the findings was the fact that trust, which had been very solidly established among
In this paper we present an overview of the field of distributed development of software systems and applications (DD). Based on an analysis of the published literature, we consider threats to communication, coordination and control in DD caused by Temporal Distance, Geographical Distance, and Socio-Cultural Distance. The analysis results in a more complete framework for reasoning in the DD domain which should be a useful resource for both academic researchers and practitioners.
The academic literature and popular press has chronicled large IT project failures for the last 40 years. Two points of contention surround this debate. First, quantitative studies found mixed sup-port of a wide-spread crisis, questioning the representativeness of failure cases. Second, organiza-tional theories disagreed on underlying assumptions about the nature of uncertainty, in particular about stability, locus of control, and controllability of the causes of IT project disasters. To ad-vance the understanding of these two gaps four hypotheses were tested with a sample of 4,227 IT projects. The findings showed that outliers are stable phenomena following power laws, oc-currence and impact of outliers differs between public and private sector, benefits management is associated with thinner tails and lower risk, and agile delivery methods do not statistically signifi-cantly influence the thickness of the tails. In sum, outliers are stable and non-random phenomena. They matter more than medians or means when it comes to IT project risk. Second, the notion of outliers bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative studies. The findings also show that causes of outliers are, at least to some extent, internal and controllable by organizations. Lastly, the paper draws implications for organizational decision making, learning, and risk management.
This paper won the IRNOP 2013 Best Presentation Award
We address the question of how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) differs among countries and how and why it changes. Applying two schools of thought in institutional theory we conceptualize, first, the differences between CSR in the USA and Europe and, second, the recent rise of CSR in Europe. We also delineate the potential of our framework for application to other parts of the global economy.
In recent years, the use of, interest in, and controversy about Agile methodologies have realized dramatic growth. Anecdotal evidence is rising re- garding the effectiveness of agile methodologies in certain environments and for specified projects. However, collection and analysis of empirical evidence of this effectiveness and classification of appropriate environments for Agile projects has not been conducted. Researc hers from four institutions organized an eWorkshop to synchronously and virtually discuss and gather experiences and knowledge from eighteen Agile experts spread across the globe. These ex- perts characterized Agile Methods and communicated experiences using these methods on small to very large teams. They discussed the importance of staff- ing Agile teams with highly skilled developers. They shared common success factors and identified warning signs of problems in Agile projects. These and other findings and heuristics gathered through this valuable exchange can be useful to researchers and to practitioners as they establish an experience base for better decision making.
Project stakeholder distribution in Global Software Development (GSD) is characterized by temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance, which creates challenges for communication, coordination and control. Practitioners constantly seek strategies, practices and tools to counter the challenges of GSD. There is increasing interest in using Scrum in GSD even though it originally assumed collocation. However, empirically, little is known about how Scrum practices respond to the challenges of GSD. This paper develops a research framework from the literature as a basis for future research and practice. The framework maps current knowledge and views on how Scrum practices can be used to mitigate commonly recognized challenges in GSD. This research is useful as a reference guide for practitioners who are seeking to understand how Scrum practices can be used effectively in GSD, and for researchers as a research framework to validate and extend current knowledge.
Global software development (GSD) is a phenomenon that is receiving considerable interest from companies all over the world. In GSD, stakeholders from different national and organizational cultures are involved in developing software and the many benefits include access to a large labour pool, cost advantage and round-the-clock development. However, GSD is technologically and organizationally complex and presents a variety of challenges to be managed by the software development team. In particular, temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distances impose problems not experienced in traditional systems development. In this paper, we present findings from a case study in which we explore the particular challenges associated with managing GSD. Our study also reveals some of the solutions that are used to deal with these challenges. We do so by empirical investigation at three US based GSD companies operating in Ireland. Based on qualitative interviews we present challenges related to temporal, geographical and socio-cultural distance
The increasing globalization of software industry demands an investigation of requirements engineering (RE) in multisite software development organizations. Requirements engineering is a task difficult enough when done locally-but it is even more difficult when cross-functional stakeholder groups specify requirements across cultural, language and time zone boundaries. This paper reports on a field study that investigated RE challenges introduced by stakeholders' geographical distribution in a multi-site organization. The goal was to examine RE practice in global software development, to formulate recommendations for improvement as well as to provide directions for future research on methods and tools. Based on the empirical evidence, we have constructed a model of how remote communication and knowledge management, cultural diversity and time differences negatively impact on requirements gathering, negotiation and specification. Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding of requirements, together with reduced awareness of working local context, trust level and ability to share work artifacts significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies geographically distributed customers. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving RE practice in this setting.
This article presents the experiences of practitioners supporting survivors of human trafficking in developing core skills in a workplace setting in the Philippines. Safe and supportive workplace environments that use evidence-informed strategies to strengthen core skills can contribute to the healthy reintegration of human trafficking survivors.
The aim of this study is to understand the key resources needed to ensure successful impact sourcing (ImS) initiatives in Malaysia. In this study, ImS refers to the effort of creating employment opportunities to marginalized communities by bringing simple, low-value outsourcing tasks to the communities. Using Porter’s Diamond Framework in ImS initiatives in Malaysia, we identified the availability of good ICT infrastructure, vibrant presence of SSO firms, and strong government support as key enablers of ImS in Malaysia. The challenges for ImS success in Malaysia include low English proficiency and high attrition rates among ImS workers and absence of micro-payments providers. Nevertheless, such challenges could be overcome by realizing the potential of ImS with full government support. These findings contribute to the formulation of potential strategies and policies in ensuring the growth of ImS in Malaysia.
Impact sourcing is an emerging phenomenon that aims to transform people’s lives, families, and communities through meaningful employment in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sectors (Lacity et al. 2012). The Rockefeller Foundation has been the leading global institution promoting impact sourcing through its Digital Jobs Africa Initiative. The Rockefeller Foundation supported two key reports by The Monitor Group (2011) and Avasant (2012). In The Monitor Group/Rockefeller Foundation (2011), impact sourcing is defined as “employing people at the bottom of the base of the pyramid, with limited opportunity for sustainable employment, as principal workers in business process outsourcing (BPO) centers to provide high-quality, information-based services to domestic and international clients” (p. 2). In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation, The Monitor Group, and Avasant, a number of organizations, like the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP 2009) and National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) foundation,¹ and scholars have begun to examine impact sourcing (Heeks 2012ab; Lacity et al. 2012) and its related concepts, ethical sourcing (Heeks 2012a), sustainable global outsourcing (Babin and Nicholson 2009; 2012), microwork (Gino and Staats 2012), corporate social responsibility (CSR) in outsourcing (Babin 2008), social outsourcing (Heeks and Arun 2010), and rural sourcing (Lacity et al. 2011).
Impact sourcing (ImS) is the practice of bringing digitally enabled outsourcing jobs to marginalized individuals. The idea that ImS can play a role in providing sustainable livelihoods to marginalized individuals in the global south is steadily gaining credence among academics and practitioners. The claims of ImS ventures of positively impacting lives of marginalized individuals through employment have been supported by recent empirical inquiries (e.g., Heeks and Arun 2010; Madon and Sharanappa 2013; Malik, Nicholson, and Morgan 2013; Lacity, Rottman, and Carmel, 2014). Researchers have so far adopted Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” (Madon and Sharanappa 2013; Malik et al. 2013) and the “sustainable livelihoods framework” method (Heeks and Arun 2010) to understand the impact of ImS on individuals and communities.
Rapid growth rates in India and other Asian countries have led to a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty but has also led to rising inequalities across sub-national locations, particularly across rural and urban sectors, and between skilled and unskilled workers (Ali 2007). A factor that has contributed to this trend is IT outsourcing activity in which a small segment of the population has benefited from an extraordinary boom while large segments of the population are stuck with low wages, little or no social services, and remote opportunity for improved mobility. In recent years new IT sourcing models have emerged as rising costs in urban centers have forced many large business process outsourcing (BPO) companies to outsource low value-added tasks to employees in rural areas with the role of government limited to that of a catalyst and facilitator. This new rural BPO activity is mainly driven by traditional players in the outsourcing market using revenue-based business models to reduce labor costs.
This chapter explores the practice of employing prisoners to perform business services for the public and private sectors. The International Centre for Prison Studies reports that there are 6,291,179 prisoners worldwide. The United States (US) has the greatest number of inmates with 2,193,789 prisoners and the highest incarceration rate at 737 inmates per 100,000 people compared to all other countries. Given that 95% of US inmates will one day be released and given that 70% of released inmates become repeat offenders (FPI 2012), any intervention that can help released inmates re-enter society successfully must have positive impacts on the individuals, their families and communities. Prison employment programs have been one such intervention method. In this chapter, we aim to study a special type of prison employment program: the hiring and training of prisoners to perform business services using a computer, otherwise known as “digitally enabled” business services (Carmel et al. 2013).
This chapter investigates the social development impact of impact sourcing, an emerging sub-field of global Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Proponents of impact sourcing claim that it can create outsourcing employment opportunities through Information Communications Technology (ICT) for marginalized people living in areas of poor employment opportunities (Monitor 2011). Impact sourcing is a relatively new field with intense research potential and limited research literature. Most of the global outsourcing academic literature is focused on various dimensions of the management of commercial outsourcing (for a comprehensive review see Lacity et al. [2010] and Lacity et al. [2011]).
This practitioner report outlines the nature of constraints to the development of ICT markets in Kenya, and identifies the cause of key market failures to grow domestic capacity. Results of an initiative to improve Kenyan ICT capacity though mentoring, international collaboration and the use of Agile project management methods are discussed. Based on findings from CodePamoja, a two-year collaboration between Dutch and Kenyan IT companies and the German government, the report explains how the use of cross-border Agile teams may align well to the objectives of those working in ICT4D.
The European Commission (2011) defines Corporate Social Responsibility as "a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis" (p. 3). Outsourcing affects the interests of laborers and ethical outsourcing protects their interests through the act of acting together, ensuring that labor protection is a shared responsibility between the participants. An aspect of social philosophy helps rectify this problem by introducing ethical outsourcing that occurs upon fulfilling the combination of three features: (1) the inclusion of all participants in a joint activity, (2) all participants agree to enter into a multi-lateral agreement, (3) the voluntarism of each participant practicing CSR is strengthened by the peer-to-peer demands of fulfilling these obligations. This chapter proposes that business leaders must find incentives engaging their outsourcing participants in multi-lateral contractual agreements. The empowerment of the participating organizations is incentivizing because of the engagement in participatory decision-making through the act of acting together.
A compilation of prestigious contributions from eminent thinkers in the field, this book focuses on the topic of socially responsible outsourcing (SRO). Building on the previous title in this series, Socially Responsible Outsourcing develops the concept of 'Impact Sourcing' which has gained increased commercial and academic interest over the past four years, and discusses how and why clients and providers have embraced social responsibility. Socially Responsible Outsourcing includes research frameworks, rich case studies, and an SRO agenda for the future.
Globalization trends, trade liberalization in developing countries, quantum improvements in worldwide telecommunications infrastructures, and cost-cutting pressures have together compelled many companies to examine global opportunities for sourcing some of their IT operations. Such global sourcing, whether it involves insourcing or outsourcing, requires IT project managers to deal with issues unique to operating in heterogeneous international environments. This article examines the influences of country-level and individual-level factors on the effective management of offshore IT sourcing relationships and offers a set of best practices that project managers should consider when entering into such global arrangements.
The offshore outsourcing of financial and other services has generated considerable political heat in Western countries over the past decade. In this paper we subject the realities of offshoring to observation at company level by unpacking the strategies underlying the offshoring decision and related ethical considerations, in respect of a US-based flagship financial services firm renowned as exemplary in international business process engineering and corporate social responsibility. Through interviews with senior executives in the case organization, and with leading management consultants in the field, we build a picture of the potentially contradictory strategic logics which have characterized the approach to offshore outsourcing in the company over more than a decade.
Global software development has become an extremely important issue for organizations at present in the climate of increasing tendency towards globalization and global outsourcing. A number of studies have been conducted which have identified a set of problematic-areas which are common across projects, including language and cultural differences, trust factors, communication across temporal and spatial distances, lack of shared contextual awareness. This study of global software development at Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) is especially noteworthy for a number of reasons. Firstly, the project has recently moved from a co-located to a globally-distributed one, and thus the team had already had experience of being co-located a factor that has not typically been the case in the studies published to date where teams are being established who have not previously been co-located. Also, as language and cultural factors were not an issue, the study was able to focus on the problems of communication over temporal and spatial distances. The study discusses how ADI attempted to address these problems and identifies the initiatives that worked well, and, more importantly, those that did not work as well. Among the findings was the fact that trust, which had been very solidly established among team members during co-location, was significantly eroded as the project team was reconstituted on a distributed basis.
Sheba Achieng Otieno and her siblings were raised by a single mother in a house made of sheet metal in one of Nairobi’s massive urban slums. Sheba has one wish: to create a better life for her and her siblings than the one they were born into.
Sabun Ou dreams of becoming a lawyer and helping to end corruption in Cambodia. Born into a farming family and living with a physical disability, Sabun wants a life that takes him beyond his rural childhood and the constant teasing he received.
Syna Haung’s family makes baskets. Her father ascends the mountains of Cambodia’s Kampot Province three times a week to gather bamboo, which her mother weaves into baskets and sells, earning just enough to subsist on day by day. Syna studies marketing at university now and plans to start her own company.
These three young, motivated, and determined people are our colleagues. We work together at Digital Divide Data (DDD), a digital services company that spans three continents, Asia, Africa, and North America. Our company’s purpose is to offer these talented youth a chance to connect to the global economy, to explore their personal and professional interests, to join a community of other young professionals, and to achieve their dream of living fulfilling and rewarding lives.
In the United States we would call Sheba, Sabun, and Syna young professionals, noting that they are the first generation in their families to go to college. However, the international development community is more likely to see them as part of the “youth bulge”—that is, the largest generation with the lowest employment rate the developing world has ever seen.
Through our work in Southeast Asia and East Africa, we see firsthand the critical global development challenge presented by youth unemployment. Half of today’s world population is under 25 years of age; 90 percent of these young people live in poor countries and about 88 million do not have work. Many are growing up in slums and rural areas where there are very few jobs, and most jobs that exist are in the informal sector. According to the International Labor Organization, another 152 million youth subsist on jobs that offer no real path out of poverty. Policymakers, governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are addressing the problem because a sizable youth cohort can quickly become a source of instability if youth unemployment is not addressed. Equally important is the fact that so many young people are missing the opportunity work provides for personal development and for having a sense of purpose at a critical time in their lives.
Sheba, Sabun, Syna, and our other young colleagues in Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya have shown us that one solution to these challenges is impact sourcing, which is a way to leverage a $300 billion industry known as business process outsourcing (BPO) to create jobs and opportunity. As co-founders of Digital Divide Data, one of the pioneers of impact sourcing, we’ve seen how a private sector approach to development is succeeding where international aid often fails.
We are tremendously excited by the potential of impact sourcing to build young people’s knowledge and skills and promote their long-term success, to develop talent in growing economies, and to drive economic growth. Yet we know that jobs alone are not enough. Impact sourcing can create large-scale opportunity for youth from poor families to develop themselves through education and employment, thus enabling them to build careers and lives that far surpass their childhood experiences of day-to-day survival. We envision a world in which members of the youth bulge can thrive and lead and create a better future for themselves, their families, and our planet.
The BPO industry, which involves contracting business functions out to third-party service providers, can serve as a catalyst for the young generation. Although some see it as an industry that chases low-cost labor, the sector employs several million people worldwide, especially in countries such as India, the Philippines, and China. In India alone, the BPO industry has grown from 1.2 percent of gross domestic product in 1998 to 6.4 percent in 2011. In the...
In recent years, a growing number of social enterprises have focused their attention on harnessing the benefits of trade in software by involving underprivileged communities from developing countries in the production of information technology (IT). The goal of this type of activity, known as social IT outsourcing, is not only to provide employment and income to low‐income individuals but also to address wider development priorities within the locality. This paper focuses on strengthening our understanding of social IT outsourcing as a promoter of development. Based on research in Jharkhand, eastern India, we seek to understand how social IT outsourcing activity is interpreted from the perspective of employees who provide data services for the market and from the perspective of the social enterprise that balances its market orientation with its social development goals. Our findings generate new insights into the mechanisms at play through which social IT outsourcing is able to provide a variety of developmental advantages to rural poor communities leading to policy implications for governments and development agencies.
Software development teams need highly valuable knowledge to carry out knowledge-intensive development activities. Agile teams are cross-functional teams that promote sharing of project-specific knowledge through frequent faceto-face interaction, effective communication and customer collaboration. Knowledge sharing is difficult for distributed Agile teams due to spatial, temporal, and cultural barriers, which negatively affect face-to-face interaction, communication and collaboration. There seems to be very few studies that focus on knowledge management in distributed Agile teams. Through a Grounded Theory study that involved 45 participants from 28 different software companies in the USA, India and Australia, we investigate distributed software development from the specific perspective of Agile teams. In this paper, we describe how Agile teams gather, store, share and use knowledge in distributed software development.
An alternative to outsourcing and offshoring is domestic sourcing, or outsourcing in one's home country. A subset of domestic sourcing, known as rural sourcing, is presented. The establishment of one rural sourcing firm is documented as an example of what might be possible on a wider scale to stem the tide of sending American jobs to other countries. Rural sourcing is emerging as a significant option within the information technology industry, either as a standalone delivery model or as part of a global outsourcing solution.
This note summarizes the argument to be presented in the author's Plenary Address. I What is now known as Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) has been continuously developed and honed in a programme of action research which is now in its thirtieth year at Lancaster University. Development continues, but SSM can fairly be described as 'mature', that maturity stemming from a conscious focus not on systems theory, not on systems practice, but on the relation between the two: how the two continuously create each other. II Initially, the action research was structured by trying to use a hard systems engineering (SE) approach in messy management problem situations. That methodology failed; and rethinking the fundamental basis of SE led to SSM. SE is a systematic appraisal of alternative means to achieve objectives taken as given. The experiences in the research programme required a more holistic systemic approach, and SSM emerged as a learning system.
The findings from a case study involving a mid-sized software development organization illustrate the complex interaction of factors common to many global software development projects. The focus of the study is a single product development group that was distributed between two international divisions of the company, one in Canada and one in Germany, for a twenty-month period. When the distribution ultimately failed, it was a web of social, cultural, linguistic and political factors, rather than use or misuse of specific tools or techniques, that emerged as being most significant in the project's ultimate demise. A summary of these factors is presented here.
An abstract is not available.
The necessity of finding right skilled people, sharing resource and limitation on cost has made distributed software development indispensable. In a distributed development project, but are working collaboratively toward the outcome. Such offshore service providers follow the traditional process models. Agile practices promote development iterations, open collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life cycle of the project. Adapting these practices in a distributed environment can help distributed development tackle the challenges of cultural incompatibility, leadership struggle and lack of trust. This paper describes the benefits of using Agile process and Scrum the iterative incremental process in Distributed Software development, and proposes two team structures for its implementation.
As a number of high profile companies have found to their cost, corporate reputations can be significantly affected by firms'' management of sustainability issue, including those that are outside their direct control, such as the environmental and social impacts of their supply networks. This paper begins by examining the relationship between corporate social responsibility, reputation, and supply network conditions. It then looks at the effectiveness of one tool for managing supply network sustainability issues, ethical sourcing codes of conduct, by examining how the characteristics of three supply networks branded clothes, DIY wood products and branded confectionary affects the implementation ethical sourcing codes of conduct. It ends by setting out conclusions on why implementation of such codes has been so much more successful in some sectors than others and recommendations on effective approaches to managing sustainability issues in supply networks.
Software development as a knowledge intensive activity involves high requirements for communication and collaboration between its practitioners. In global software development, geographical, cultural and language distances bring additional challenges to communication. While text-based communication is very common in global software projects, recent improvements in telecommunications technology and network infrastructure have enabled ad-hoc audio conferencing as an economically feasible and available communication medium. Media richness theory suggests audio conferencing as a richer medium to have potential in leveraging uncertainty and equivocality, while media synchronicity theory suggests using multiple communication media to accomplish a task. This empirical qualitative study is based on 57 interviews from eight global software development projects. We discovered that self-conception of poor language skills leads to preference to use text-based communication media. We also found out that technical personnel tends to prefer text-based communication media more than non-technical team members.
This paper reviews research studies of information technology outsourcing (ITO) practice and provides substantial evidence that researchers have meaningfully and significantly addressed the call for academics to produce knowledge relevant to practitioners. Based on a review of 191 IT outsourcing articles, we extract the insights for practice on six key ITO topics relevant to practitioners. The first three topics relate to the early 1990s focus on determinants of IT outsourcing, IT outsourcing strategy, and mitigating IT outsourcing risks. A focus on best practices and client and supplier capabilities developed from the mid-1990s and is traced through to the late 2000s, while relationship management is shown to be a perennial and challenging issue throughout the nearly 20 years under study. More recently studies have developed around offshore outsourcing, business process outsourcing and the rise, decline and resurrection of application service provision. The paper concludes by pointing to future challenges and developments.
The focus of this paper is on the intersection of Environmental Responsibility (ER) and Global IT Outsourcing (GITO). GITO is well established as a business practice towards reducing costs and improving performance. ER is becoming increasingly important in global outsourcing in relation to environmental issues. The cost of energy has already increased dramatically and further increases appear likely. Sustainability issues related to carbon footprint and greenhouse gases (GHG) are also becoming increasingly important. Thus responsible and economic energy management has become a critical business capability and an important social responsibility. Global outsourcing of IT operations to a less energy efficient, less environmentally responsible organization may provide increased returns to shareholders, but may also become an ER liability. The key question this paper seeks to answer is how are GITO vendors transforming their ER capabilities? Drawing on preliminary fieldwork and an extensive literature search, we conclude that ER issues will become important capabilities for outsourcers to demonstrate, as buyers are increasingly sensitive to their stakeholders' environmental concerns.
IT and business process outsourcing providers are building delivery centers in remote domestic locations for several reasons, including to access a more stable, lower-cost workforce and to fulfill social missions such as employing underprivileged or minority populations.
To overcome the problem of distance in global software development, various managers are experimenting and quickly adjusting their tactical approaches. We discuss some emerging approaches and explain their motivations from conceptual and practical perspectives. The most intuitive approach for alleviating distance is to apply communication technologies, but this is not our focus. Rather, we examine tactics that go beyond communication technologies, tactics aimed at reducing intensive collaboration, national and organizational cultural differences, and temporal distance.
While organisations recognise the advantages offered by global software development, many socio-technical barriers affect successful collaboration in this inter-cultural environment. In this paper, we present a review of the global software development literature where we highlight collaboration problems experienced by a cross-section of organisations in twenty-six studies. We also look at the literature to answer how organisations are overcoming these barriers in practice. We build on our previous study on global software development where we define collaboration as four practices related to agreeing, allocating, and planning goals, objectives, and tasks among distributed teams.
We found that the key barriers to collaboration are geographic, temporal, cultural, and linguistic distance; the primary solutions to overcoming these barriers include site visits, synchronous communication technology, and knowledge sharing infrastructure to capture implicit knowledge and make it explicit.
Social outsourcing means the contracting out of goods or services to social enterprises. When used by government, it can be seen as a hybrid of the workfare outsourcing found in wage employment schemes, and the commercial outsourcing of government activities to the private sector. This paper focuses on a social outsourcing initiative operated by the government of Kerala State, India. Part of this outsources information technology (IT) services to dozens of cooperatives of women from below-poverty-line families. Interview and case study research was undertaken to assess the impacts of this initiative on five areas of livelihood assets-financial, human, physical, social and political capital. This scheme has Keralan specificities and research shows that social outsourcing may introduce vulnerabilities and questions of sustainability. Overall, though, this paper suggests that social outsourcing has the potential to deliver developmental benefits to marginalised groups. It is therefore worthy of greater attention from international development agencies and governments in developing countries. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Software-Projekte erfordern intensive Kommunikation sowie die Zusammenarbeit verschiedener Parteien und Vertreter von Interessensgruppen, die jeweils unterschiedliche Positionen einnehmen. Ein Großteil dieser Kommunikation ist informell und dient z.B. der Diskussion, der Klärung von Fragen, Verhandlung, bzw. dem Aufdecken von Wissen. Projektbezogene Kommunikation wird zunehmend vielschichtig durch den kombinierten Einsatz elektronischer und nicht elektronischer Kommunikationsmittel. Dies gilt sowohl für lokal an einem Ort durchgeführte Projekte, als auch -- in besonderem Maße -- für verteilte oder gar globale Software-Projekte. Kommunikationsfehler sind in diesem Zusammenhang kostspielig und gefährden den Projekterfolg, insbesondere wenn sie in den frühen Phasen des Lebenszyklus auftreten. Aus diesem Grund ist die wissensbasierte Kommunikations- und Kooperationsunterstützung aller Phasen des Projektes erforderlich. Ausgehend von Studien, die auf grossen und verteilten Projekten durchgeführt wurden, darunter einer Studie des Autors, haben wir iBistro entworfen. iBistro ist eine experimentelle Umgebung zur Erfassung von Wissen in den verschiedenen Phasen globaler Software-Projekte. Dabei werden die gesammelten Informationen in einem Rationale-basierten Ansatz strukturiert. Das so gesammelte Wissen wird den verschiedenen Projektbeteiligten in späteren Projektphasen oder neuen Projekten durch das System zur Verfügung gestellt. Dabei ist das Ziel von iBistro, die bestehenden Prozesse und Methodiken einer Organisation so wenig wie möglich zu beeinflussen und dennoch sowohl Umfang und Qualität des erfassten Wissens zu verbessern. iBistro sammelt somit Informationen durch eine Vielzahl von Wissensquellen (Knowledge Sources) und stellt dieses Wissen über anpassbare Wissens-Sichten (Knowledge Views) wieder zur Verfügung. Das somit aufgebaute Wissens- und Informationsnetz bildet ein elektronisches Gruppengedächtnis (Group Memory). Diese Dissertation stellt eine gemeinsame Architektur für Wissenserfassung, Wissensakquise und Wissensverwendung von Projektwissen vor. Darüber hinaus bezieht sich der Begriff ,,Projektwissen'' auch auf Ergebnisse der Arbeitsprozesse, wie zum Beispiel Dokumente oder Quellcode. Dies führt zu komplexen Querverbindungen zwischen solchen Artifakten und allgemeinen Wissens-Informationen. Die Architektur, genannt Distributed Concurrent Blackboard Architecture (DCBA), erweitert das aus der Künstlichen Intelligenz bekannte Konzept der Blackboard-Architektur. Die DCBA-Architektur ermöglicht die nebenläufige Erfassung von informellen Informationen und Wissen in vielschichtigen Kommunikationsmitteln und -wegen, wie z.B. Arbeitstreffen, in Brainstorming-Treffen, Email, oder bei der Verwendung von Entwicklungswerkzeugen, wie z.B. der Versionskontrolle. Die DCBA-Architektur wurde dabei speziell für die Unterstützung verteilter Teams in synchronen und asynchronen Szenarien entwickelt. In einer Fallstudie wurde die Implementierung der DCBA-Architektur zwischen der National University of Singapore und der TU München getestet und iterativ weiterentwickelt. Dabei deckte das verteilte Szenario die Schwierigkeiten bei der verteilten Projektarbeit mit unstrukturierten und nicht integrierten Werkzeugen im Vergleich zur Verwendung der DCBA als Wissensquelle für eine kleine verteilte Arbeitsgruppe auf. Diese Dissertation schlägt eine spezielle Team-Formation für Globale Software Entwicklung, das balancierte Team, vor und diskutiert deren Unterstützung in iBistro.
'Capacity building' is the objective of many development programmes and a component of most others. However, satisfactory definitions continue to elude us, and it is widely suspected of being too broad a concept to be useful. Too often it becomes merely a euphemism referring to little more than training. This paper argues that it is more important to address systemic capacity building, identifying a pyramid of nine separate but interdependent components. These form a four-tier hierarchy of capacity building needs: (1) structures, systems and roles, (2) staff and facilities, (3) skills, and (4) tools. Emphasizing systemic capacity building would improve diagnosis of sectoral shortcomings in specific locations, improve project/programme design and monitoring, and lead to more effective use of resources. Based on extensive action research in 25 States, experience from India is presented to illustrate how the concept of the capacity building pyramid has been put to practical use.
With outsourcing on the rise, every relation between an outsourcer and a vendor calls for collaboration between multiple organizations across multiple locations. As part of a global IT-services organization with high process maturity, we have had many opportunities to understand the requirements engineering life cycle related to global software development. RE is a software project's most critical phase; the RE phase's success is essential for the project's success. Case studies from an Indian IT-services firm provide insights into the root causes of RE phase conflicts in client-vendor offshore-outsourcing relationships
Leveraging global resources for software development is rapidly
becoming the norm at Motorola, which has over 25 software development
centers worldwide. Our project, called the 3G Trial (Third Generation
Cellular System), was the first of its scope and significance developed
by a global engineering team at Motorola. Staffing was the most
significant issue we encountered in the 3G Trial. We had only about 20
percent of the required staff available at our division headquarters in
Burlington Heights, Ill., US, and needed to find the other 80 percent to
successfully complete the project. Early on, we concluded that our only
means to staff the project was to rely on software development engineers
from Motorola's worldwide software centers. We developed the system with
staffing from six different countries. Next, we had to integrate the
people into a team. While addressing this challenge, we identified key
risk factors and developed approaches to reduce them. We separated the
project risk factors into the five categories Carmel (1999) describes as
the centrifugal forces that pull global projects apart. To pass on the
lessons we learned from this project, this article sets out the global
development issues we faced, our approaches to resolving them, and our
findings compared to other research