Global IT Outsourcing, Software Development Across Borders

by Sundeep Sahay, Brian Nicholson and S. Krishna
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003
282 pp. Trade, $60.00
ISBN: 0-521-81604-1.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

Global Software Alliances (GSAs) are partnerships between software houses in the developed world, on the one hand, and software companies in the developing world, on the other hand. In recent years, Indian, Russian, Israeli and Chinese companies have rapidly expanded their exports of IT services through these GSAs, and many developers in the UK, USA, Japan, and other traditionally leading countries in the software business feel threatened by this relocation of labour across the globe. An analysis of the trends in Global Software Work (GSW) and the rise of the GSAs is certainly due. Managers want to learn from the experiences of others; pioneers and early adopters in the practice of GSW and policy makers in the developed countries want to alleviate the fear of loss of IT jobs; and strategists and analysts want to have a preview of the future and get some answers to frequently asked questions by their customers: Is this another bubble? Is this a real threat or rather an opportunity at the corporate level, and how will it affect markets and company results worldwide?

The authors have chosen to take a twofold approach. First, they supply the reader with a clear and concise framework for understanding globalisation, in general, and GSW, in particular, briefly discussing different theories of globalization and introducing useful concepts for describing the processes involved along the way. Next, they describe and analyse in considerable depth six cases of global software alliances, using each case to illustrate those concepts. In this way, they use GSA's both as 'models of' and 'models for' globalization, dialectically linking the abstract to the particular and the specific to the general. This dual approach leads to syntheses of theoretical and managerial implications, based upon inter-case comparisons of various theoretical and managerial issues.

For most people who are at least superficially acquainted with the literature on globalization, most of the themes will not come as a surprise. But the most attractive feature of this study is the way most of these themes can be seen arising in the dealings of a single Canadian software company, GlobTel, with four Indian companies. The processes of standardization and knowledge transfer and the (re)definition of identity, space, and place are well known from the work of Castells, Giddens and a wide range of authors on knowledge management, and we can see them at work through the eyes of the people who have to deal with them on a day-to-day managerial level. The ideas literally come to life as the analysis progresses. Management itself, of course, is a problematic activity in a GSA, even if it is less thoroughly discussed in sociological theories of globalization. So the analysis of power and control in GSW through the example of Gowing-Eron is a very important addition to existing theories. Moreover, international collaboration poses practical problems of an entirely different nature. Horizontal relationships between workers in different places across the globe are not necessarily mechanical and stripped of personal aspects. So, the cultural aspect comes into play, as well, a field of tension that the authors chose to explore through the example of Indian-Japanese collaboration.

This book will not only be of interest to the sociologist and the manager but also to anyone who wants to get a clear picture of what globalization actually means and who wants to go beyond the slogans and clichés of the heated debate that is held in the streets and in the plush chairs of countless conferences.