We All Know How, Don’t We? On the Role of Scrum in IT-Offshoring

Part 2: Creating Value through Software DevelopmentInternational audienceOffshoring in the IT-industry involves dual interactions between a mother company and an external supplier, often viewed with an implicit perspective from the mother company. This article review general off shoring and IT offshoring literature, focusing on the proliferation of a globally available set of routines; Scrum and Agile. Two cases are studied; a small company and short process and a large mother company with a long process. The interactions of the set ups shows that global concepts like Scrum and Agile are far from a common platform. The “well known” concepts are locally shaped and the enterprises have mixed experiences

Using “Yams” for Enterprise Knowledge Sharing among Knowledge Workers from the Perspective of a Task Categorisation-Knowledge Sharing Systems Fit

Part 2: Key Competencies, Learning and Life TransitionsInternational audienceEmerging digital technologies play a key role in the development of enterprises. Their uses demand a transition on the part of knowledge workers, however. Web 2.0 is an emerging communication technology that supports collaborative knowledge sharing in corporate learning paradigms, changing tailor-made, expensive and high learning curve digital systems to simple but well-accepted ones [1, 2]. These platforms revolutionise how participants share, communicate and create knowledge in a corporate setting [3]. The use of Web 2.0 to support Knowledge Sharing (KS) has been extensively investigated [4, 5]. Studies that use a task-technology fit model on systems such as decision support [6] and eLearning [7] demonstrate that a good fit between tasks and digital technologies is able to improve performance of knowledge workers. This research reports the outcomes on the fit between task categorization and knowledge sharing systems. The task categories and Web 2.0 functions used in knowledge sharing practices were consistent. The outcomes highlighted that intuitive design, ease of use and a low learning curve were able to elicit both tacit and explicit organizational knowledge. Text analysis demonstrated that new knowledge was created, exchanged and shared. The study concluded that knowledge sharing activity and the fit between Web 2.0 functions and task categories were consistent and significant

Strategic Relevance of Organizational Virtues Enabled by Information Technology in Organizational Innovation

The central theme of this paper is that information technology (IT) can serve to create ethical organizations endowed with virtuous characteristics, and that such ethical organizations can innovate better in today’s dynamic market environment. Drawing on the notion of virtue ethics propounded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, we theorize that core organizational IT affordances influence the development of organizational virtues, which in turn influence organizational improvisational capabilities and innovation. We propose the “IT-virtues-innovation” (IVI) model and test it using a cross-organizational survey of 250 employees from various organizations in the United States. Our findings largely support our proposal that IT affordances positively influence organizational virtues, which then influence organizational improvisational capabilities, thus improving organizational innovation. This paper contributes to the understanding of organizational innovation by articulating the strategic usefulness of IT-enabled organizational ethics, and it explains how IT-enabled ethical competence (virtues) influences strategic competence (improvisational capabilities and innovation)