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 the 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 |
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Title of host publication | CSCW 2015 - Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing |
Number of pages | 15 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. |
Publication date | 28 Feb 2015 |
Pages | 876-890 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450329224 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 28 Feb 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 - BC, Canada Duration: 14 Mar 2015 → 18 Mar 2015 |
Conference
Conference | 18th ACM International Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2015 |
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Country/Territory | Canada |
City | BC |
Period | 14/03/2015 → 18/03/2015 |
Sponsor | ACM SIGCHI, et al., Facebook, GRAND, Microsoft Research, National Science Foundation (NSF) |
Keywords
- ethnographic study
- excavation work
- Global software development (GSD)
- information infrastructure
- interface integration
- legacy systems
- outsourcing
- system interfaces