Abstract
We report on an ethnographic study of an outsourcing global software development (GSD) setup between a Danish IT company and an Indian IT vendor developing a system to replace a legacy system for social services administration in Denmark. Physical distance and GSD collaboration issues tend to be obvious explanations for why GSD tasks fail to reach completion; however, we account for the difficulties within the technical nature of software system task. We use the framework of information infrastructure to show how replacing a legacy system in governmental information infrastructures includes the work of tracing back to knowledge concerning law, technical specifications, as well as how information infrastructures have dynamically evolved over time. Not easily carried out in a GSD setup is the work around technical tasks that requires careful examination of mundane technical aspects, standards, and bureaucratic forms, as well as the excavation work that keeps the information infrastructure afloat.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | CSCW '15 Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Pages | 876-890 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-2922-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- Global software development (GSD)
- outsourcing
- ethnographic study
- information infrastructure
- legacy systems
- interface integration
- system interfaces
- excavation work