Software outsourcing quality achieved by global virtual collaboration

In today’s rapidly changing and highly competitive global environment, offshore outsourcing (contracting of a portion or all of the software development function to software engineers outside the home country) teams working across national borders and virtual organisations have become a fact. The globalisation of the software market has also changed the contextual boundaries of information systems (IS) research and practices to include the wider societal context. Management experiences difficulties when applying traditional management approaches, because of the increased complexity of global organisations and their dependency on people with different underlying norms, values and beliefs. Researchers call for caution in managing global workers. They argue that behavioural traits of diverse work groups can contribute to dysfunctional organisations. Cultural sensitivity has become a core issue. This article discusses the implications of globalisation in software development and seeks to make more explicit the human dynamics that have a bearing on the success of outsourcing and virtual collaboration. Two models, namely, the e-Sourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM-SP) and the Software Quality Management – Cultural and Organisational Diversity Evaluation (SQM-CODE) Model, are proposed to bring added value for service purchasers in their search for, selection of and collaboration with service providers. The eSCM-SP, a capability maturity assessment model related to IT-enabled sourcing, is briefly discussed and the SQM-CODE model, a tool for assessing the fit between organisational and national culture, is presented, and its importance for identifying cultural factors and taking appropriate action in order to achieve a cultural fit between the service provider and the contractor in outsourcing business partnerships is revealed. Copyright  2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.