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Why Replacing Legacy Systems Is So Hard in Global Software Development: An Information Infrastructure Perspective

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
February 2015
1956 pages
ISBN:9781450329224
DOI:10.1145/2675133
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 February 2015

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Author Tags

  1. ethnographic study
  2. excavation work
  3. global software development (gsd)
  4. information infrastructure
  5. interface integration
  6. legacy systems
  7. outsourcing
  8. system interfaces

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  • Research-article

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  • National Council for Strategic Research, Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education in Denmark

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CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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