MIS Department Seminar Series

2008-2009 Schedule

Speaker
Institution		 Date
Time
Location		 Seminar Title Seminar Materials
Natalia Levina
NYU 		October 10, 2008
11:30am - 1pm
394 Speakman 		Innovating or Doing as Told? The Role of Middle Managers in Overcoming Status Differences and Overlapping Boundaries in Offshore Collaboration Abstract
Paper
Tony Bryant
Leeds Metropolitan University		 October 24, 2008
11:30am - 1pm
300AB Tuttleman
Omar Al Sawy
USC		 November 7, 2008
11:30am - 1pm
Sandra Slaughter
Georgia Tech		 November 14, 2008
11:30am - 1pm
Ola Henfridsson
Viktoria Institute		 November 19, 2008
11:30am - 1pm
Sunil Wattal
Temple University		 January 30, 2009
Steven Johnson
Temple University		 February 13, 2009
Rajiv Sabherwal
UMSL		 February 27, 2009
11:30am - 1pm
394 Speakman
Alok Gupta
Minnesota		 March 27, 2009
11:30am - 1pm
394 Speakman
Ann Majchrzak
USC		 April 10, 2009
11:30am - 1pm
Ramayya Krishnan
CMU		 April 17, 2009
11:30am - 1pm
394 Speakman

*For questions or comments regarding the Seminar Series contact Prof Sunil Wattal.

Natalia Levina, NYU presents "Innovating or Doing as Told? The Role of Middle Managers in Overcoming Status Differences and Overlapping Boundaries in Offshore Collaboration."

Increasingly, firms source more complex and strategic as well as harder to codify IT projects to low cost offshore locations. Completing such projects successfully requires close collaboration among all participants. Yet, achieving such collaboration is extremely difficult because of the complexity of the context - multiple and overlapping boundaries associated with diverse organizational and national contexts separate the participants. These boundaries also lead to a pronounced imbalance of resources among onshore and offshore participants giving rise to status differences and inhibiting collaboration. This research adopts a practice perspective to investigate how differences in country and organizational contexts give rise to boundaries and associated status differences in offshore application development projects and how these boundaries and status differences can be renegotiated in practice to establish effective collaboration. To illustrate and refine the theory, a qualitative case study of a large financial services firm, which sourced a variety of "high-end" IT work to its wholly owned subsidiaries ("captive centers") and to third party vendors in multiple global locations (e.g., India and Russia), is presented. Using a grounded theory approach, the paper finds that differences in country contexts gave rise to a number of boundaries that inhibited collaboration effectiveness, while differences in organizational contexts were largely mediated through organizational practices that treated vendor centers and captive units similarly. It also shows that some key onshore managers were able to alleviate status differences and facilitate effective collaboration across diverse country contexts by drawing on their position and resources. Implications are drawn for the theory and practice of global software development and multi-party collaboration.

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