REQUIREMENTS COMMUNICATION CULTURE IN MOBILE SERVICES DEVELO(5)

“Culture is one thing and varnish is another.”

It is important to bear in mind, then, that, participating in an interview or responding to a questionnaire in itself can be seen, of course, as an everyday, locally situated and ‘accountable’ activity, from which we can learn, ethnomethodologically speaking, just as much or more about what people do in those particular settings, as one can learn about their work. This is not an attempt to promote a naïve punch-line along the lines that people do not say exactly what they mean when they are interviewed or respond to web-based questionnaire (although that is probably the case as well, from time to time). It means that an interview or replies to a questionnaire rather than being treated as a positive imprint of the external world could be seen as ‘data in itself’, as indeed is the case for this paper, and subjected to a reflexive analysis.

Reading this paper it is useful to consider the analytical platform that ethnomethodology as such represents, inasmuch as it gives significant status rather than treating as only residual aspects of social phenomena, the subjective orientation and multiple levels of logics; and the situated rationale of the participants themselves, to the very extent that it constitutes a systematic set of methods for ‘achieving’ an organization of their work, as software developers and project managers, and producing meaningful accounts of such work. This means, therefore, that participants are not treated as “cultural dopes” or pieces on a chess-board which are simply subjected to institutionalized forces from without, which, behind their backs, as it were, expose actors to a systematic “grammar” that can only be viewed from the “prioritized” vantage points of science. Instead, the methodological point of view of this paper is that of the actors themselves.

Of course, the ethnomethodological objection to functional explanations thus subscribed to is particularly amicable toward looking for alternatives to the dominant assertions about cultural factors and communication problem influencing the performance and organization of offshore outsourcing of software. Some might even argue that it is biased or anti-theoretical in this respect. This is not the case. The ethnomethodological stance levels out the bias that was there from before, by which research on offshore outsourcing has given residual status to the participants’ own accounts of culture and communication, treating it either as a positive image of “the way things are” (in cases where it overlaps with the theoretical perspective of the researcher) or as an external force from which the actors actions are essentially determined.

4 RESULTS

Looking at the web-based interview form, which was administered to 12 managers in the distributed development organization, we find that there is some systematic bias in the reports. For instance, the attitudes taken from the “western” perspective of the Oslo operation seems to confirm the findings from previous research (Coward 2003). The product managers claim that:

Development and testing takes too long, sometimes because the people responsible do not

manage to be sufficiently proactive

Deliveries are uncertain (due to lack of control, e.g., the developers not working by a

prioritized order of projects)

Cultural difference are a big challenge, for instance it is claimed that the development

organization generally have a greater need for more detailed specifications

Communication is poor, for instance by time zone differences and language barriers making

communication less effective

From the developing organization offshore, on the other hand, the respondents pointed to the general attitude that “outsourcing” product managers had towards them, perhaps seeing tight schedules and insufficient funding as a concretization of such attitudes. More notably, they objected that “the customer” was changing the scope of objects of the project underway, adding functionality after the design and development “checkpoints.” And this is an important formulation by the project managers; they see communication problems as a manifestation of product managers in Oslo lacking the capacity to state their desires in the “lingua franca” of systems development, namely the requirements specification. Therefore, it is necessary, they claim, to meet with the product managers face-to-face.