Editorial

Abstract

In the first paper of this issue, Zheng et al. (2011) look at systems development in a global collaborative community in the unusual setting for information systems (IS) research of high energy physics. The case study offers insights and implications for agile systems development in large scale and distributed settings. The paper studies the on-going construction of the UK's computing grid for particle physics, a grid that is itself part of the world's largest grid, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. The paper proposes ‘scaled agility’ as a way to understand the design practices associated with distributed, innovative software development concerning middleware applications supporting high-scale grid computing. A set of improvisation paradoxes, which are argued to define scaled agility, are developed as an analytical framework to unpack the paradoxical nature of distributed systems development. The paper applies theories of organisational improvisation and the notion of paradoxes to characterise the nature of the software development in this activity and distinguishes it from the ‘agility in the small’ and traditional hierarchical ‘development in the large’ with which most readers will be much more familiar (see also Baskerville & Pries-Heje, 2004 and Kautz et al., 2007). The paper of Christopher Williams (2011) looks at knowledge-based theory to develop and test a model of client-vendor knowledge transfer at the level of the individual offshore IS engineer. The embedding of offshore vendor personnel in client projects is central to the success of many offshore outsourcing contracts, yet such knowledge transfer is difficult over large geographic, cultural and institutional distances. The paper reports on the results of a survey of vendor software engineers physically located in India but working on development projects for clients in Europe and the USA. The paper offers important insights for the management of information technology (IT) offshore contracts and narrows the gap in our understanding of the mechanisms by which offshore outsourcing vendors may overcome distance and innovate within client IS development projects. Furthermore, unlike the client perspectives provided in most of the outsourcing literature, this study focuses on vendor perceptions. Berente et al. (2011) consider the classification or ‘stratification’ of IT users that researchers tend to make along functional boundaries or by their membership in various communities of practice (see also Millerand & Baker, 2010). The authors raise ethical concerns (Stahl, 2008) when individuals whose interests, values or identification align with other issues may be inadvertently marginalised. They propose a novel framework that maps stratification strategies that researchers bring to their analyses using Weber's theory of stratification and the dimensions of class, status and party, in conjunction with his distinction between heterogeneous and homogenous forms of work. They offer illustrative theoretical lenses for each category in the framework and demonstrate how each lens favours certain issues and potentially neglects others.