The purpose of this study has been to investigate knowledge managerial challenges in global software development projects, and industry approaches to overcome these. An empirical study with case study approach has been used to study GSD-projects in real life. Let us recall the research questions:
What are the knowledge managerial challenges in global software development, and what approaches are implemented by the industry to overcome these? How can these challenges and solutions fit into existing knowledge management theories and concepts, and what is the role of informal communication in a global setting?
Conducting this case study at Mitos has not been easy due to late initiation caused by a lengthy discussion about research questions. Also, as often common in studies requiring close interaction with corporations, there have been coordination issues. Even with a short data collection period, eight in- depth interviews, tens of email correspondences with follow-up questions, and informal talks with several sources at NMO served as sources for acquiring information. Observations, mainly from India, but also some from Norway, have been described to give context, and also because some of the information is directly related to knowledge sharing.
The observed challenges were grouped into six categories, and some of Mitos’ approaches to cope with these issues were presented. These challenges and solutions were summarized and presented in Table 5-4, and the main challenges can be further summarized into these three issues:
• Mainly coding and unit testing in India. This work distribution causes long learning curve for IMO. They will have difficulties building domain knowledge due to lack of shared tacit knowledge, difficulties internalizing due to distance and limited shared mental model.
• Difficulties due to customer’s reluctance to use English. Language reveals itself as an important factor for not using IMO in much of the early phase work. Customer seems to prefer using Norwegian, which is an aspect outside the control of Mitos. Documents and meetings in Norwegian are additional issues caused by the language barrier. • Lack of informal talks across distance. This is a challenge with great
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mechanism, but difficult to deal with due to its root cause, namely physical distance. Informal talks are a coordination mechanism that is invisible in the sense that it is not planned and documented, it just happens. In addition to being helpful in coordinating the project, it also builds relationships, and promotes knowledge sharing and innovation. However, it is difficult to facilitate such informal talks in a global setting.
A concluding remark can be a statement made by a team lead in India: I am in
an imaginary world, where I have not met the people I create system for, and I don’t even have a very good understanding of the domain of functions I am creating (Ano6, Appendix B.5), denoting lack of domain knowledge due to
working mostly with coding, and having little formal and informal customer interaction. Thus, the quotation describes the three main issues implicitly. The main impression is that Mitos is a mature organization when it comes to conducting software development with globally distributed teams. Earl’s (2001) engineering school of knowledge management enforces the use of methodologies and processes to aid in daily work, and such processes have been developed and used over several years at Mitos. Many sources (Conchúir, Holmström, Ågerfalk, & Fitzgerald, 2006; Mullick, et al., 2006; Sangwan, Bass, Mullick, Paulish, & Kazmeier, 2007) argue that visiting each other is crucial to be able to conduct software development with distributed teams. This case study reveals that majority of the Indian informants have visited Norway, and there are also often Norwegians in India. In addition,
intermediaries with cross-cultural experiences are used to diminish the socio-
cultural distance. The main impression among many informants is that the communication and co-operation between NMO and IMO is good; some initial trust issues caused problems, but over time, when relationships developed over national boundaries, this problem had less impact.
This case study differs from many other studies in respect to a few aspects: it deals with three-node communication, while others mainly deal with two-node communication; it gives the Indian point of view, rather than the western; it uses knowledge management theories more extensively; it uses findings from famous anthropological work in the discussion. These contributions are useful to enrich the field of information systems and broaden our view, and I have here shown an example of their use.
Using knowledge management theories was a crucial part of this thesis. Although not all challenges were easy to explain with KM-theories (here, research community should look into concepts from other fields like social and business anthropology, psychology and sociology), the theories were
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essential for explaining why different issues occurred rather just explain what happened. Especially, recognizing tacit knowledge in the discussion proved to be useful for stating reasons for challenges, and to describe internalization and
externalization processes across sites.
Through this study, I have revisited challenges already known in the research literature, in addition to identify new ones. Giving historical, contextual and
processual information, and use them in the analysis along with the
knowledge management theories, rather than only state the challenges and solutions, made it possible to get a better interpretation of the case.
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