A systematic mapping study about socio-technical congruence

Abstract

ContextLack of coordination may create significant problems between work teams, this problem is even most critical when team workers are geographically distributed as it results in cost increases and delays in the projects. There exists a technique called Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) that aims at helping to measure and control the coordination level existing in an organization at their different levels. ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to carry out a systematic mapping of the field of socio-technical congruence. The aspects of particular interest for this article are: Socio-Technical Congruence definition, different ways to measure it, available tools to measure or that can help to measure it, the areas of application, its benefits and the case studies that analyze the effects Socio-Technical Congruence has on the organization as regards the products quality and the improvements in performance in the long term development, in an attempt to characterize the state of the art of this field identifying gaps and opportunities for further research. Therefore, companies could use this work as a starting point to apply STC measures in their work teams. ResultsThis paper presents the results of a systematic mapping of Literature about Socio-Technical Congruence (STC) in order to investigate and classify the existing articles and conferences about the subject, as well as summarizing the most important aspects in regards to provide a general overview about the existing studies. ConclusionsAfter analyzing the 40 papers found, we can conclude that there is no one standard measure of socio-technical congruence, although most take the proposal by Kwan et al. applying adaptations and improvements on it as regards the environment that it will be focused on. In general, most case studies talk about the benefits of STC control in organizations. However, only one paper focus on global software development where the problems of communication, coordination and control are an important risk. Moreover, there are only a few papers that explore the risks of excessively overloading users with coordination iterations when controlling STC. In fact, no case study to examine these risks and their effect on developers’ productivity has been found. The small number of studies found on STC, together with the research gaps we have pointed out, suggest that further investigation on socio-technical congruence is required.