Cultural Issues in Globally Distributed Information Systems Development: A Survey and Analysis

Global information technology offshore outsourcing and globally distributed information systems development have become increasingly prevalent and diversified, thus demand great academic efforts to address a wide variety of issues. Although some studies have begun to synthesize relevant theoretical and empirical research of the complex phenomena, there is a lack of synthesized efforts to provide an in-depth discourse of cultural issues in globally distributed information systems development. This research provides a preliminary review and analysis on how culture is conceptualized and how cultural issues are investigated in the published literature on offshore outsourcing and globally distributed information systems development. Our findings show that national level of cultural influences is the dominant level being studied, although the socio-cultural context of globally distributed information systems development is complex and multi-leveled in nature. While some common cultural dimensional models are still widely used, several studies adopt the emergent and dynamic view of culture to investigate the cross-cultural information systems development work.