Technologies Available at the Offices in Copenhagen and Chennai When entering the IT-department at the client’s headquarters in central Copenhagen one finds oneself in a large shared office, where all IT-employees are seated, including the department head and member of the senior management team with the dual title of Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). The tables are grouped in clusters relating to functions and organizational affiliation. This way the COO/CIO and the Head of IT-operations are sitting together; the client-side IT-service managers are sitting together; the native Danish vendor-side actors is in close proximity with each other; the onsite vendor-side actors ditto. In the same way the client-side project managers and internal developers are grouped in clusters relating to their current project affiliation.
Up until summer 2013 there were free seating in the department. While this was not used in practice – almost everybody was taking the same seat every day, week and month – it meant that the desks were highly impersonalized. No personal artifacts would be on the tables and all work-related paper was put in the employee’s lockers at the end of each day. All client-side actors are equipped with laptop computers and company-issued mobile phones and thus, they are not confined by technology to working in a specific location. At the client’s headquarters there are also several meeting rooms equipped with video conferencing equipment and additionally a lot of meeting rooms with phone conferencing hardware.
At the Operations Management Center (OMC) in India the vendor-side actors are all located in a large room that can accommodate up to 100 people at the same time. The vendor-side actors are grouped by functions. Each desk is equipped with a landline phone as only the management team has company-issued mobile phones, though quite a lot of vendor-side actors are making themselves available for incoming calls on their personal mobile phones, judging from their email-signatures where their mobile phone numbers are listed. In terms of computers some employees are equipped with laptops while others are working on desktop computers. In general, the OMC managers and team leads as well as other functions, such as change management and incident management, are equipped with laptops, making it possible for them to bring their computer to meetings and to work from home when required, while employees that has a lesser need for mobility are equipped with desktops.
Within the OMC there are two meeting rooms. One is equipped with a phone conference system, whereas the other has equipment for video conferencing as well as hardware for phone conferencing. Additionally, there are several meeting rooms with similar facilities outside the OMC – but at the same floor – which can be booked by the vendor-side actors.
Technology Utilization
The fact that all actors, both client-side and vendor-side, have computers is hardly a surprise. And the fact that all these computers are connected to high-speed corporate Internet connections is probably not a great revelation either. The computer is the central means to communication between the actors – as in so many other organizations. What is interesting is what happens “under the hood” of this vehicle of mediated communication, so to speak.
The computer-mediated communication is essentially four-fold: Email, chat, browser-based software and ad hoc file sharing. In the following I will go through the utilization of each of these types of communication.
Email is king. It can be said that easy! Every single actor I have asked about the primary means of communication vis-à-vis distributed collaboration highlights email as the most used communication tool. There are several reasons why email is the most predominantly used means of communication. First, email is documentation. Several of the actors on both sides highlight this and explain that they see a distinction between for instance phone conversations and emails. One vendor-side actor explain that “I call up the client and ask them for approval, they approve on the phone [and] then I just drop an email stating that as per your approval we’re restarting the server” (Interview
#22). By working this way the vendor-side actors have their back covered, so to speak, if there, at any point in time, should arise questions as to why they have acted the way they did. The client-side actors also recognize this dependency on documentation.
However, they have a slightly different understanding. While the vendor-side actors express the need for documentation as a proof of acting according to orders and in a timely manner, should something go wrong, the client-side actors believe that the vendor-side actors are using emails to be able to revisit the correspondence in cases of doubt. One client-side actor says:
“Indians like to have everything in writing. […] I think it may be because they won’t say that they don’t understand it […] which is why it is best to have everything in writing so they can go back and see what I asked for.”
(Interview #17 – client-side actor)
Secondly, email can help avoid language barriers. Several of the vendor-side actors have told me that they are deliberately using email, because they feel that their client-side counterparts have a hard time understanding the Indian accent, when speaking over the phone. And a few of them explain that they, themselves, face difficulties understanding the Danes in verbal communication. This is supported by some of the client-side actors who also express that they find it difficult to understand the Indian accent, when communicating verbally with their Indian counterparts. Thirdly, several actors from both organizational entities express that there is a mental barrier to contacting people they don’t know from the other organization, which makes it easier to write an email than to pick up the phone.
In addition to emails, chats are also used. With regards to internal communication between vendor-side actors (Danish as well as Indian), their computers are equipped with Microsoft Lync, which is heavily utilized. With regards to interorganizational communication between vendor-side and client-side actors they are using Google Hangout. However, the latter is a very recent development. For the first 18 months of collaboration instant messaging was not possible due to technical and security reasons:
The client is to a wide extent using cloud based services including Google’s mail service, Gmail, and hence the use Google’s instant messaging and video-chat service
‘Hangout’ for chats. However, at the vendor organization ‘Hangout’ was not possible due to internal policies on security and Internet-usage. This was changed for the OMC employees post a client visit to the OMC in September 2013. Hence, at this point in time the option to use instant messaging is a fairly new possibility for interorganizational communication between the actors.
Among the vendor-side actors there seems to be general consensus that chatting is a useful and fast way of communicating. However, in the client organization there are divergent opinions on communicating via instant messages: On one hand some share the opinion of the vendor-side actors and on the other hand some clearly state that they prefer not to use instant messengers – “I don’t do stuff like that” as one of the client-side actors puts it (Field Notes 20130226).
Finally, browser-based software and ad hoc file sharing are also essential to the communication between client-side and vendor-side actors. Such tools are used to communicate in a standardized way. For instance, requirements specifications are communicated by the means of document templates; ongoing status reporting is communicated via browser-based interfaces and standing reports are communicated via power point templates. (The role of such artifacts will be analyzed further in Chapter VI: ‘Flipping the Switch on Trust and Control’)
Apart from computer-mediated communication tools, some actors also use phones for on-to-one communications across organizational boundaries. During my observation studies at the client’s headquarters I have listened in on numerous phone calls and it is evident to me that phone calls are by and large only used in two scenarios: In cases of complexity that has surfaced after a longer mail correspondence and in cases of urgency. That is, until a certain issue has either proved to be difficult to handle via emails or if the issue needs immediate attention everything is handled by email or in a few cases by chat. For instance, one of the vendor-side actors, an incident manager, charged with the responsibility of coordinating that incidents and problems reported are resolved according to the service level agreements explain that when critical incidents arise even in the middle of the night she will call her counterpart at Berlingske Media because “The client also feels that if something happening in their environment […] they want them to be the first people to know that” (Interview #22).
However, she also states that even though she is required to call her client-side
counterpart as well as the OMC manager there is a difference: With regards to calling her own manager (the Head of the OMC) she says that “we definitely wake them [up]”
(Interview #22), but concerning the client-side counterpart she “really give it a thought whether I should call him or not” (Interview #22). This reluctance to call the client-side actors on the phone is similar for many vendor-side employees, who state that they prefer communicating in writing – even during normal business hours.
When more than two people are included in the communication the actors make use of emails as well as phone and video conferencing. In the cases of phone and video conferencing there are primarily three instances where these are used: Urgent issues, standing meetings and project meetings.
In urgent cases, such as breakdown of business critical systems or services, the parties will typically arrange phone conferences where the vendor-side manager bearing the responsibility for resolving the issue will report to the client-side managers as well as his or her own managers on the progress at agreed intervals, for instance every hour or every two hours depending on the urgency and impact of the issue at hand. Such meetings are also used for coordination – in cases where resolving the issue is dependent on client-side involvement. In cases where this is not the case there will typically only be a single conference call and the remained is status information sent via email at specified intervals. For standing meetings, such as the weekly change board meeting and the monthly service delivery meeting phone conferencing is typically the preferred choice of media. However, after the client delegation’s visit to Chennai in September 2013 this seems to have changed: During the visit the OMC manager showed one of the video conferencing rooms to a selected group of the client-side employees and suggested that they could conclient-sider using video for the coming service delivery meetings. This was agreed upon (Field Notes 20130927) – and eventually effectuated.
Interestingly, there was a perception among some client-side actors that video meeting was not possible due to lack of video conferencing facilities at the OMC. One client-side actor explained that “they [the vendor-client-side actors] don’t have any meeting rooms with video down there, except for a large conference room which they only use on special occasions […] It [video conferencing] should definitely be utilized more. It gives a better sense of face-time” (Interview #6).
With regards to phone conferencing, I have repeatedly experienced that the audio quality for phone conferences being unstable. Most of the time the connection is quite good, but sometimes it is muffled. In contrast, the quality of the videoconferences is consistently high; the picture is clear, the audio is good and the lightning in the rooms permits good visuals.
Finally, with regards to project meetings video is the preferred medium for project start-up, where a video meeting of the duration of approximately one hour is agreed upon and executed. For the remained of the project’s life meetings are typically held via phones and most communication and coordination is done via emails and chats.