Mark,

Thank you for inviting me to serve as a reviewer to determine the “best published paper by an OCIS member in 2000.” Based on my review, I would rank the papers as follows:

1. “Bridging space over time: Global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness” by M. Maznewski and K. Chudoba.

2. “Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practices Lens for Studying Technology of Organizations” by W. Orlikowski.

3. “Coordinating Expertise in Software Development Teams” by S. Faraj and L. Sproull.

ABOUT THE PAPERS

Coordinating Expertise in Software Development Teams

The goal of this paper is to develop and test a model of expertise coordination in knowledge teams. It provides a theoretical argument for an expertise view of team work, and separates coordination into administrative and expertise components. By demonstrating the importance of expertise coordination above and beyond traditional factors, this research contributes to the literature on team coordination, extends previous conceptualizations of coordination, and sheds light on previously contradictory findings in coordination studies.

Data on software development teams were collected from the applications development division of a large high-tech firm specialized in software development. A total of 333 respondents from 69 team from 13 sites across the Unite States participated in the study. The empirical results suggest that expertise coordination plays a significant role in explaining team performance above and beyond traditional factors.

This study contributes to the debate on composition effects of teams by providing support for the role of social integration as a factor leading to superior performance. It also sheds light on previous inconclusive results regarding the link between coordination and performance which may be due to a lack of differentiation between efficiency and effectiveness dimension of performance. The study is noteworthy for its use of organizational teams in a field setting as well as the use of stakeholders for measuring performance. It is one of the first cross-sectional field studies to investigate distributed cognition and coordination in organizationally situated knowledge teams.

Limitations: Doesn’t tell us anything about how expertise coordination unfolds over time. Use of subjective rather than objective performance measures. Limited sample, limited to teams developing business application software.

Bridging space over time: Global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness

This paper develops a theory of global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness, grounded both in the previous literature and in a qualitative, longitudinal field study. The authors propose that effective global virtual team outcomes are a function of appropriate interaction incidents and the structuring of those incidents into a temporal rhythm.

Within the structure of the technology available, effective interaction incidents match function and complexity, which are in turn affected by task and group characteristics. The temporal rhythm is structured by a defining beat of regular, intense face-to-face meetings, followed by less intensive, shorter interaction incidents using various media.

The authors studied three global virtual teams, collecting data over a period of 21 months. The study is helpful in better understanding that global virtual team effectiveness requires a complete description of process and structure, of technology and social systems, and of the interaction among these dimensions over time. It also provides a set of grounded propositions for the further study of global virtual teams. It demonstrates the value of the approach advocated by DeSanctis and Poole beyond the GDSS setting used to illustrate AST. For practitioners, the paper provides advice to team members concerning how to choose media between face-to-face meetings by identifying the important decision criteria.

Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practices Lens for Studying Technology of Organizations.

In this paper, the author seeks to augment the existing structurational perspective on technology by proposing a view of technology structures, not as embodied in given technological artifacts, but as enacted by the recurrent social practices of a community of users. This view directs researchers’ attention to what people do with technology in their everyday practices, and how such use is structured by the rules and resources implicated in their ongoing action. Rather than trying to understand why and how a given technology is more or less likely to be appropriated in various circumstances, a practical lens focuses on knowledgeable human action and how its recurrent engagement with a given technology constitutes and reconstitutes particular emergent structures of using the technology (technology-in-practice). Thus, the research orientation is inverted—from a focus on given technologies, embodied structures, and their influence on use—to a focus on human agency and the enactment of emergent structures in the recurrent use of technologies.

The paper derives its findings from secondary data from two different sites. In particular, the author uses data from previous studies on the use of Louts Notes software products at 1) a large, multinational consulting firm with offices in hundreds of cities around the world, employing thousands of consultants who work on project engagements to deliver professional services to clients, and 2) a top 50 U.S. software company producing an selling a range of powerful marketing analysis products.

Coordinating Expertise in Software Development Teams

More research has been called on the development of shared understanding in teams, socially shared knowledge about groups, their members, and their work.

This research improves our understanding of the importance of coordination among team members. It provides a theoretical argument for an expertise view of team work, and separates coordination into administrative and expertise components. By demonstrating the imporatnace of expertise coordination above and beyond traditional factors, this research has contributed to the literature on team coordination, extended previous concpetualizations of coordination, and shed light on previously contradicctory findings in coordination studies.

The goal of this study was to develop and test a model of expertise coordination in knowledge teams. The empirical results suggest that expertise coordination plays a significant role in explaining team performance above and beyond traditional factors.

This study contributes to the debate on composition effects of teams by providing support for the role of social integration as a factor leading to superior performance.

It also shed light on previous inconclusive results regarding the link between coordination and performance may result from a lack of differentiation between efficiency and effectiveness dimension of performance.

The study is noteworthy for its use of organizational teams in a field setting as well as the use of stakeholders for measuring performance.

It is one of the first cross-sectional field studies to investigate distributed cognition and coordination in organizationally situated knowledge teams.

Limitations: Doesn’t tell us anything about how expertise coordination unfolds over time. Use of subjecstive rather than objecdtive performance measures. Limited sample, limited to teams developing business application software. One large organization.

Research:

Data on software development teams were collected from the applications development division of a large high-tech firm specialized in software development.

A total of 333 respondnads from 69 team from 13 sites across the U.S. participated in the study.

In addition, tdata was collected from 135 stakeholder respondents. Nine ouf to 78 teams in the sample did not participate or completed the study.

Bridging space over time: Global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness

This paper develops a theory of global virtual teams dynamics and effectiveness, grounded both in previous literature and in a qualitative, longitudinal field study. The authors propose that effective global virtual team outcomes are a function of appropriate interaction incidents and the structuring of those incidents into a temporal rhythm.

Within the structure of the technology available, effective interaction incidents match form to function and complexity, which are in turn affected by task and group characteristics. The temporal rhythm is structured by a defining beat of regular, intense face-to-face meetings, followed by less intensive, shorter interaction incidents using various media.

It provides a set of grounded propositions for the further study of global virtual teams.

It demonstrates the value of the approach advocated by DeSanctis and Poole beyond the GDSS setting used to illustrate AST.

Understanding global virtual team effectiveness requires a complete description of process and structure, of technology and social systems, and of the interaction among these dimensions over time.

It suggests some future directions for group and organizational research.

Contributions to practice:

Provides advice to team members concerning hot to choose media between face-to-face meetings, identifying the important decision criteria.\

Research approach:

The authors studied three global virtual teams, collecting data over a period of 21 months

No limitations are stated.

Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practices Lens for Studying Technology of Organizations.

In this paper, the author seeks to augment the existing structurational perspective on technology by proposing a view of technology structures, not as embodied in given technological artifacts, but as enacted by the recurrent social practices of a community of users. This view directs researchers’ attention to what people do with technology in their everyday practices, and how such use is structured by the rules and resources implicated in their ongoing action. Rather than trying to understand why and how a given technology is more or less likely to be appropriated in various cirucumstances, a practical lens focuses on knowledgeable human action and how its recurrent engagement with a given technology constitutes and reconstitutes particular emergent structures of using the chnology (technology-in-practice). Thus, the research orientation is inverted—from a focus on given technologies, embodied structures, and their influence on use—to a focus on human agency and the enactment of emergent structures in the recurrent use of technologies.

Research: Secondary data from three different sites. The use of Louts Notes software products.

A large, multinational consulting fimr with officies in hundreds of cities around the world, employing thousands of consultans who work on project engagements to deliver professional services to clients.

Zeta. A top 50 U.S. softare company producing an selling a range of powerful marketing analysis products.

Jan and Mark,

I have carefully reviewed the paper entitled “Action and counteraction when you are at a loss: responding to failing projects.” I perfectly understand that this paper is aimed to have a similar flavor to the paper that Mark and I wrote for Sloan Management Review, but this time targeted to Global Focus.

Thank you for taking a first crack at preparing the paper. However, I have four main concerns that I recommend addressing before working further on this paper:

  1. This paper is TOO closely crafted to the Sloan paper. If you remove the data from the VUE case, almost every paragraph had just been pasted from the original paper. We have to be VERY careful with this.
  1. I can definitively understand that the VUE system is an IT project that failed. After reading the data in this article, however, I am not convinced that the project suffered from escalation of commitment. This needs to be clearly stated, before we start talking about de-escalation. It is not clear that during the course of the project countervailing forces (including psychological, social, and organizational forces) gradually but progressively strengthened the commitment toward the project in a way that made it difficult to withdraw when negative results began to appear.

In this project, it seems that there were many issues going on in the immediate context of the project (but outside the control of the project management team) that might had been more important than the “escalating commitment.” It appears that at the time that the VUE project began in 1991 the Ministry of Education and Research was a single entity. Then, it seems that the Ministry of Education took control over the project, and by 1998, the Ministry of Research was managing it. If this correct, my assumption is that the VUE management team changed over time.

Suggestion: Can we show that commitment toward the VUE project increased over time even when different management teams were responsible for its development (or is this more a case of a dead body being passed around, but no-one really taking full responsibility).

Suggestion: If the management teams over time were the same, clearly separate factors that affected the project that were outside and inside the control of the project management team.

  1. The VUE system case is hard to follow because its presentation is not chronologically organized. In addition, mapping the VUE project into the four-phase framework seems very force fitted. Please notice the four-phase framework present a process model in which the outcomes at each phase are implied by the preceding events. Thus, the sequence of events needs to be carefully reviewed. For example, from the description of the paper, it seems that “Recognizing the problem” (Phase 1) took place in January 1999, while “Rescoping the problem” (Phase 2) was in 1995. Another example: in page 15 last paragraph of the “responding to pressure from outside” section, it is stated that an independent investigation was commissioned, the final report was delivered in April 2000 (after the project had been closed down). Obviously the report of this investigation was not useful in the decision to close down the project. So, why present the action of commissioning the investigation in Phase 2 as important?

Suggestion: Maybe we can show (trace) here that there were several cycles of escalation and de-escalation over time. (This would be an incremental difference with the SMR paper).

  1. All the advice provided at the end of the article, “Seven strategies to reduce commitment to failing project” is identical to that given in the Sloan paper.

Suggestion: It is important to provide a few strategies that came directly from the VUE project that built on the Sloan paper, but yet they are different.

If you want to talk more about it, please feel free to correspond or call me (303-492-0416).

Cheers,

Bernard,

Thank you for the analyses that you and your student have conducted. I am sorry that the Guatemalan data was dropped from the study, but I have to agree with you that the results derived from that sample are not the “common” results expected from the Guatemalan society. So, I agree that the paper will be stronger without the data from Guatemala. Having said that, it doesn’t make too much sense for me to be part of this study. That’s OK with me.

Please let me know if I can be of any help in our other study using the data from Argentina, Costa Rica and Guatemala.

Best wishes,

Ramiro

Journal of Management Information Systems

REVIEWER COMMENTS

Title of Paper:“Stakeholders’ Perceptions of Strategies to Improve the Technological Infrastructure for E-Commerce in Africa’s Least Developed Countries.”

R E V I E W

Purpose of the paper:

The paper builds on past IT literature to examine specific factors that hinder diffusion of e-commerce in Africa’s least developed countries (LDCs). In particular, the study surveyed 71 individuals involved in the adoption of e-commerce in Africa’s LDCs to better understand key obstacles. The authors then match the obstacles identified with specific strategies proposed by prior research. At the end, the authors discuss the findings and call for further research in this area.

Strengths

-In general, I agree with the authors about the importance of the topic. It is clear that the use of information and communication technologies is fundamentally changing organizations and enabling the development of new forms of work within them. Many predictions have been made about the economic and social benefits that less-developed countries will experience as a result of the advent of the information age. The Internet has been often portrayed as a kind of panacea for a multitude of the world’s problems, and as an important catalyst that will propel less-developed countries forward to a new position of strength in the world economy. Unfortunately, many of the “new” capabilities required to harness the economic value of information—abstract thinking, intellectual skills, and know-how—are very scarce in the vast majority of developing countries. In this context, the authors correctly point out the need for research to better understand obstacles to Internet technology diffusion and possible strategies to overcome these obstacles, particularly in the least developed nations of the world.

-Most of the current discussions on the adoption of the Internet emphasize its characteristics as a “global communications medium.” This article, however, provides very interesting data that clearly indicate that the use of the Internet differs a great deal depending on what part of the world we consider.

Weaknesses

-The paper in its present form lacks sufficient motivation for researchers interested in information systems located in developed nations (the dominant audience of the Journal of Management Information Systems) to understand what new knowledge can be gained by reading it. The authors carefully portray the obstacles faced by adopters of e-commerce in Africa’s LDCs, but they stop short of offering a compelling case for the paper’s novel contribution that would merits its publication in the Journal of Management Information Systems. In particular, the motivation for the study needs to be better developed in the introduction.

-The authors fail to clearly present the research question of the study. It is not stated until page 12 that “the second research question centers on the differences in the importance of the strategies between the government and non-government stakeholders.” The first research question is never as clearly stated. Furthermore, I found the “Introduction” and “Background” sections to be very redundant.

-The paper lacks a systematic description of current issues and debates on the topic. One of the main reasons for writing such a description is to set the stage for the research you intend to present. This means that your review of current issues and debates must provide a methodological rationalization for your research. The flow of the review should help lead the reader from one set of ideas to the next, which in turn provides systematic reasoning for the topic you have identified for your own research project. In its present form, the paper has no clear analytical theme to carry us along. At minimum, the authors should help their readers understand how this study fits within the existing body of literature on the topic.