Annotated Bibliography of Global Information Technology

Background and methodology is found on this page,
for the full bibliography click here.

Compiled by Fred Niederman, maintained by Erran Carmel

Introduction

International commerce, characterized by near instantaneous trans-continental shifts in financial assets, assembly of products with components from all corners of the globe, and shifting populations of cross-border employees, has burgeoned over the past 20 years. At the same time, the development and distribution of computer and information technology has grown exponentially. New hardware and software devices are brought to market each week. Investment in these technologies continues to grow. The number of employees working with information technology also continues to grow.

These two phenomena, growth of global economic activity and of information technology, are not unrelated (Nanus, 1978; Bankes, et. al., 1992). Near instantaneous cross-continental cash management activities (Rochester, 1991), for example, could not take place without quick, reliable, and affordable telecommunications technology.

The simultaneity of these two trends, growth in information technology and globalization of business, raises interesting theoretical questions regarding the direction of influences between these two forces. To what extent does the growing power of information technology enable globalization? To what extent does increased globalization create demand and markets for ever more refined information technology? Do the new technologies enable firms to consider new markets and new activities? Do the desires of firms for international activities create demand for new technologies? Are uses for information technology in a global setting merely the logical extension of domestic information technologies? Does operating internationally create new areas of decision making such as the structure for direct foreign investment (Iyer, 1988)?

While there has long been some interest in global IS (e.g. Buss, 1982; Selig, 1982a; Selig, 1982b), issues within the U.S. business context have dominated I.S. research to date. However, as economic competition among nations and global commerce have grown in importance and attracted more attention, I.S. researchers are beginning to ask how their field is affected by changing from a domestic to global context.

This growing interest among I.S. researchers is paralleled by a growing interest in global trends among organizational and management researchers. This is reflected in recent Academy of Management Review (April 1991) and Management Science (January 1994) special issues focusing on the internationalization of management theory. Researchers in global IS are confronted with some of the same problems and decisions as their counterparts in organizational and management research. Among these problems are: What do we really know with confidence about MIS domestically within particular countries? Is it sufficient to test what these concepts in cross-cultural settings? Do new issues emerge only in the global context? By studying MIS in a global context, can we universalize our understanding of what occurs domestically (or will the lessons learned be so diluted that they are of little value in any particular situation)?

Topics

Global IS is an extremely broad topic. There are numerous potential stakeholders. Global IS can be addressed from the perspectives of (1) national governments, (2) economic regions (such as the European Common Market), (3) multinational and domestic firms, (4) firms creating versus using IS technology, (5) IS (or other) departments within firms, (6) labor markets within countries, and (7) consumers. Global I.S. is also difficult to tease out of the matrix of interrelated business forces such as levels of capitalization, variations in market characteristics and product preferences, and differing accounting systems and practices. These complexities increase as information technologies expand beyond accounting and financial issues in the firm being incorporated in larger products (such as automobile engine control), into production systems (such as controlling robotics), into new product design (through CAD-CAM and related engineering systems), and into global marketing systems (through inventory databases such as those used by airline reservation systems).

Based on detailed interviews with IS executives charged with managing international IS, Ives and Jarvenpaa (1991) outline a global IS research agenda. They focus on four aspects of global IS: (1) matching global IS strategy to global business strategy; (2) issues involving the technical platform for global IS applications; (3) issues involved in international sharing of data; and (4) issues of IS projects spanning cultures. This framework serves well from the perspective of a particular firm and can be extended as a beginning point for consideration of other stakeholders. Developing countries, for example, can consider the role of IS in their domestic strategies in terms of (1) issues involving technical infrastructure, (2) issues involving control of data originating in their territory, and (3) issues of culture among their residents as well as coordinating with neighbors. Additionally, developing countries will consider policies regarding multinational firms including tradeoffs between job development and tax revenue generation, policies for encouraging the development of indigenous information technology industries, and distribution of computing power among different subsets of the population.

From the perspective of the individual firm, matching global IS to global business strategy involves organizing the cross-national IS function. Daniels, Pitts, and Tretter (1984) present empirical data relating multinational firms with differing attributes (such as size, amount of foreign investment, breadth of product line) to show how they tend to use differing management control strategies. Presumably these differing management control strategies will have implications for the type and intensity of information systems required by different firms. There is much room for studying the connection between different multinational control strategies and MIS strategies/implementations.

Also to be studied are ways firms might derive advantage from the availability of information originating from many countries. Knowledge of global trends may provide an advantage to multinational firms competing in specific domestic markets (just as knowledge from throughout the United States can help larger firms be more competitive in regional markets). Instances of such advantage include: (1) pooling various sources of financing to take advantage of shifting rates and currency values; (2) introduction in one global market of products invented or improved in other global markets; and (3) increased rationalization and specialization of production and assembly taking advantage of physical and transaction resources within different locations. A related topic is the differential impact of governmental policies (such as regards financial disclosure (Gray, Radebaugh, & Roberts, 1990)) or infrastructure on the relative cost of gathering and processing information.

The cross-cultural nature of information systems can be studied in terms of (1) the impact of constant information on people of different cultures; (2) the differences in information sought and used by people of different cultures (and the strategies and approaches to decision making and other task performance by people of different cultures); and (3) the mechanisms for developing information systems to be developed and/or used by people of different cultures.

Alternative perspectives derive from national attributes and industry views. For example to the extent that design methodologies used in France, Germany, Japan, or India account for specific cultural values, can lessons learned in these countries enrich design methodologies used in Canada or the U.S.?

Treatment of domestic (US) IS issues can be compared to their treatment in other countries. For example, Wolcott and Goodman (1988) provide an interesting description of Soviet design, production, and deployment of high-speed computers. Press (1991) explores approaches to developing and marketing software in different international regions.

Approaches

IS is already an inter-disciplinary field as it draws from several other areas such as computer science, accounting, management, library science, and psychology for deriving theory. The focus within this annotated bibliography is on articles that directly treat aspects of Global MIS, however additional articles on international business, international finance, transfer of technology, and history of computing are included to cast additional light on the topic.

Method

A broad array of research methods can inform the study of global IS including descriptive journalism, archival research, case studies, and laboratory studies (particularly in the area of conflict resolution and cross-cultural communications). Thus some articles included case studies of a general MIS nature, but which were undertaken outside of the U.S.; others may more generally treat topics such as the transfer of technology (of which IS and computer systems are examples) and impacts of culture and cross cultural issues (impacting international I.S. issues, but much broader in scope as well.) It is intended that this bibliography err on the side of inclusion of entries that are only marginally international MIS per se, rather than exclusion of ones that are marginal but of some special interest. Nevertheless, some relevant articles may have been inadvertently left out. Naturally, a bibliography of this nature cannot cover all scholarly material available on issues related to global information technology (e.g. diffusion of technology and cross-cultural issues), however, a sample of entries focus on these topics.

Identifying bibliographic materials

The method for identifying materials for inclusion in this bibliography consisted primarily of (1) scanning MIS and related publications and conference proceedings (such as MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Communications of the ACM, Information and Management, ICIS, and HICSS) for relevant articles then (2) scanning references of these articles for related articles and spanning out in a widening circle of references. In the process of performing step 2, several key journals that emphasis international business, such as Columbia Journal of World Business and Journal of International Business Studies were identified and scanned for articles that are relevant to global IS. It should also be noted that while the selection of materials focused on scholarly papers, articles from additional sources such as Business Horizons and California Management Review also lend insight.

Background and methodology is found on this page,
for the full bibliography click here.

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Dr. Niederman is at the Merrick School of Business University of Baltimore Baltimore, MD 20201 USA 410-837-5276
Last update: June 3, 1996 By Fred Niederman & Erran Carmel. Please send Comments to Dr. Niederman at fniederman@ubmail.ubalt.edu