Software development in a multicultural context: Adaptive and learning organizations

One of the trends in software engineering is globalization. Companies themselves are becoming more international by means of acquisitions and mergers, their business is becoming international, and the staff represents different national cultures. Software development is expert work made in closely collaborating teams. The most natural way to do this kind of work is to implement it in local teams. Distribution of expert work increases the grade of difficulty; an additional grade of difficulty appears if the organizational parts represent different cultural backgrounds. The organizations that are distributed and multicultural must be adaptive. Adaptation can be done in two ways: either to adapt the people to the organization or to adapt the processes of the organization to take into account the differences. In practice, the former seems to be mainly used in big multicultural organizations. In this case, successful globalization also expects adaptation of the organization. There are good practices of the division of labor, management of the organization, project management, etc. that work better than others. There is also a lot of knowledge available concerning the differences between cultures. The aim of this paper is to analyze multicultural Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies, as adaptive, learning organizations. The focus is on software development work (Software Engineering - SE). The purpose is to report findings based on general cultural studies and reported experiences that seem to lead to successful globalization in the software industry. Some company cases are also described and analyzed. The paper is based on two ongoing research projects at the Tampere University of Technology.