Control, Process Facilitation, and Requirements Change in Offshore Requirements Analysis: The Provider Perspective

Process, technology, and project factors have been increasingly driving organizations to offshore early software development phases, such as requirements analysis. This emerging trend necessitates greater control and process facilitation between client and vendor sites. The effectiveness of control and facilitation has, however, not been examined within the context of requirements analysis and change. In this study, we examine the role of control and facilitation in managing changing requirements and on success of requirements gathering in the Indian offshore software development environment. Firms found that control by client-site coordinators had a positive impact on requirements analysis success while vender site-coordinators did not have similar influence. Process facilitation by client site-coordinators affected requirements phase success indirectly through control. The study concludes with recommendations for research and practice

The Economics of Electronics Industry: Competitive Dynamics and Industrial Organization

This entry highlights fundamental changes in the electronics industry that have transformed its competitive dynamics and industrial organization: a high and growing knowledge intensity; the rapid pace of change in technologies and markets; and extensive globalization. That explosive mixture of forces has created two inter-related puzzles. The first puzzle is that a high degree of globalization may well go hand in hand with high and increasing concentration. This runs counter to the dominant view, based on the assumption of neo-classical trade theory, that globalization will increase competition and hence will act as a powerful equalizer both among nations and among firms. Multinational corporations, after all, may not be such effective "spoilers of concentration", as claimed by Richard Caves (1982). The second related puzzle is that this industry fails to act like a stable global oligopoly, even when concentration is extremely high: a market positions are highly volatile, new entry is possible, and not even market leaders can count on a guaranteed survival.

How Strategy and Governance Choices Influence Innovation Success in Software Products and Services

This research studies the effect of key strategy and governance choices on chances of success of innovation in software products, and we test our hypotheses based on data from more than 150 professionals in the United States who are responsible for new software product development. We find the right balance of onshore and offshore team members to be more salient in influencing innovation success than decisions related to insourced versus outsourced development. Our findings suggest a greater likelihood of innovation when business executives make technical decisions, particularly if firms compete by selling high price margin software products or services

Unpacking Team Familiarity: The Effects of Geographic Location and Hierarchical Role

Examination of team productivity finds that team familiarity, i.e., individuals\u27 prior shared work experience, can positively impact the efficiency and quality of team output. Despite the attention given to team familiarity and its contingencies, prior work has focused on whether team members have worked together, not on which team members have worked together, and under what conditions. In this paper, I parse overall team familiarity to consider effects of geographic location and the hierarchical roles of team members. Using data on all software-development projects completed over 3 years at a large Indian firm in the global outsourced software services industry, I find that team familiarity gained when team members work together in the same location has a significantly more positive effect on team performance compared with team familiarity gained while members were collaborating in different locations. Additionally, I find that hierarchical team familiarity (a manager\u27s experience with front-line team members) and horizontal team familiarity (front-line team members\u27 experience gained with one another) have differential effects on project team performance. These findings provide insight into the relationship between team experience and team performance

Modeling Coordination in Offshore Software Development

Controlling and minimizing coordination costs has been shown to be an important factor to reduce overall project performance in distributed software development. In this research-in-progress paper we investigate the effects of software complexity, software integration, distributed labor division policies, learning effects on software coordination costs. Drawing from data collected on 130 software construction cycles in 34 large projects of a leading offshore development firm, we first present our analysis on how coordination costs relate to team organization factors and complexity of evolving software. We base our analytic model of coordination costs in offshore software development on these empirical relationships, and give an overview of our modeling approach. We apply our model of software coordination costs to develop resource allocation policies in the projects we studied. We consider both waterfall and iterative software development methodologies and also tandem and parallel integration schemes. Our modeling approach helps managers to develop a dynamic coordination policy to aid iterative software development in distributed development environments

IT Offshore Provider Profiling Strategies: New Zealand and Indian Perspectives

Offshoring of IT products and services to provider nations belonging to the Asia Pacific region is a growing phenomenon. However, clients are apprehensive of risks undertaken by outsourcing work to businesses in different economic spaces which represent different time zones, cultures and income status. This study does an empirical investigation through twenty case studies to understand the profiling strategies used by IT offshore provider organisations in two diverse countries – India (farshore) and New Zealand (nearshore) – to improve their business image and reduce clients’ perceptions of risks. Findings reveal that strategies used by IT providers depend upon ownership status by clients or third parties, their organisational size as well as cultural differences between client and provider nations. The paper contributes to existing studies on emerging offshore marketplace and explains global strategies adopted by IT provider businesses to remain competitive. offshore markets, profiling strategies, outsourcing arrangements, national consortia, accreditation

Job related factors and moderating effect of flexible work arrangement on job satisfaction among Malaysian offshore outsourcing support employees

Job Satisfaction, organization performance and employee turnover intention are closely interlinked. High performance culture organizations that promote both job satisfaction and work-life balance often produce good results and have the ability to attract and retain talented employees. Job satisfaction of fixed scheduled employees in the Malaysian offshore outsourcing support is constantly challenged from working long irregular hours to fulfill global "Follow-the-sun" workflow commitment and maintaining effective communication in a temporal dispersed virtual organization. The work time demand is felt more as the temporal dispersion variance between parties in communication widens. This research was initiated with the objective of understanding employees working under such conditions and whether having good management policies such as flexible work arrangement buffer the impact and restore job satisfaction. For this quantitative survey, 306 Information Technology Outsourcing, and Business Process Outsourcing respondents, located in the MSC flagship town of Cyberjaya, were identified. The results reveal that Malaysian offshore outsourcing workers are generally satisfied with their work environment. Whilst global communication remains a temporal dispersion challenge, flexible work arrangement does not alleviate the impact of long irregular work hours; however, it promotes job satisfaction. The findings also confirm the importance of co-workers and supervisory support in mitigating the demands of work. Contrary to the belief that globalization emphasizes cost optimization and reluctance of MNCs in spending and developing resources, most respondents acknowledged that good support from their co-workers and supervisors are vital. The study highlights the critical impact of globalization and temporal dispersion on job satisfaction among fixed working arrangement employees who support Malaysian offshore outsourcing