Some political and cultural issues in the globalisation of software development: Case experience from Britain and India

Global outsourcing of software development is a phenomenon that is receiving considerable interest from North American and European companies currently under pressure to meet their growing manpower resource shortages and find new ways to cut costs. However, these outsourcing arrangements are technologically and organisationally complex, and present a variety of challenges to manage effectively. In this paper we discuss results from an ongoing longitudinal study of a British firm's attempts to develop and manage global software outsourcing arrangements with an Indian software company. More specifically, we focus on understanding management challenges along three key dimensions of culture, organisational politics and the process of distributed development across time and space. The process of globalisation provides the context within which these management challenges can be investigated. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.