Managing New Zealand Women in IT

This chapter discusses workplace attitudes and policies that continue to affect women’s participation, retention, and promotion in the information technology (IT) workforce. It draws on data collected from two qualitative studies of New Zealand women working in the industry. The findings reveal that there are some distinct differences in the way in which males and females operate in the workplace, and that women’s values and different work practices are often not taken into account by management. Managers of IT professionals who recognise the subtleties of the gendered culture of the IT work environment and who develop and implement equitable policies and strategies will be rewarded by a creative, innovative, and productive workforce.

Reframing, Retooling, and Reskilling

An IS professional’s ability to perform in his or her role is vital to the utilisation of information systems within an organisation. The introduction of e-commerce has opened a new set of challenges for the IS professionals who are most frequently tasked with developing e-commerce solutions. However, they often do not have the competencies required to successfully execute these e-commerce projects. This competency deficit raises an important question: to what extent have the competency requirements of IS professionals changed because of the introduction of e-commerce? Furthermore, how do IS professionals managed the changes in their work environment due to the implementation of e-commerce in their organisations? Fifteen IS professionals, who are employed in businesses implementing or maintaining e-commerce strategies, were interviewed. The results indicate that the implementation of e-commerce in organisations has introduced three main areas of change to their internal work environment: (a) business changes – the perceptions of senior managers on their current role, (b) project changes – the realization that IS projects have to be managed differently and finally (c) competency changes – the need to acquire new skills and knowledge. As a consequence to these changes, the IS professional developed the following coping skills: (a) reframing – the changing of mental models that determine how we make sense of the world and how we take action based on these models, (b) retooling – the restructuring and reorganising of IS processes, especially around project management and (c) reskilling – the learning of new competencies in the e-commerce environment.

Work-Life Imbalance of IT Workers in the Internet Age

These days, no information technology (IT) manager or worker will have escaped the expectation from a client that a job needed to be completed “yesterday.” The field of information systems (IS) research is only beginning to develop models for understanding the emerging issue of workload pressures upon IT workers, and their consequent need to maintain a balance between work and home. IT organisations need to consider how they manage their IT workers, departing from the traditional efficiency approach to staff management, and moving towards one better suited to the globalised environment within which businesses now operate. In its two parts, this chapter will consider the challenges of work-life balance that IT workers increasingly face. These days, IT workers are more vulnerable than other work employment groups to the pressure of contemporary workload expectations and deadlines. Research in the fields of sociology and psychology can help fill in detail on this emerging issue, otherwise absent from contemporary IS research. Sociology and Psychology can help IT practitioners better understand the increasing human cost of the currently increasing commercial pressures. In its first part, this chapter utilises some straightforward sociological concepts to background how “top down” or strategic management of IT workers could be improved within the IT sector. Sociologists have long had a strong interest in social change, in the ways in which both work and non-work (“leisure”) activities are changing within an increasingly globalised world. Many IT workers are now suffering both physical and mental symptoms due to commonplace business management approaches, which ultimately forgo long-term business profitability for short-term bottom lines. The second part of this chapter utilises the understanding of emotional intelligence within psychology and applies it as a bottom up strategy to illustrate how IT workers can cope with work-life imbalance. Here, a case study illustrates how the emotional qualities of resilience and adaptability that some IT workers possess can enable them to overcome work-life imbalances within the pressured context of globalised IT production. Leading on from the case study, the chapter will provide guidance on how IT workers might foster these qualities using HR techniques from the recently developed field of emotional intelligence. By utilising what have so far been interrelated, yet also independent, discussions within sociology and psychology on the effects of the Internet Age upon IT workers, this chapter aims to provide a balanced approach to the intellectual and emotional management of IT workers.

The Journey to New Lands

This chapter introduces a prescriptive conceptual framework from the practitioner’s perspective for the “offshore-insourcing” journey. In the decision phase of offshore-insourcing, we answer the questions “Why to insource from offshore?” “What to insource from offshore?,” and “Where to offshore?” In the implementation phase we answer the question “How to insource from offshore?” and describe the importance of evaluating outcomes. In the process of answering these questions, we discuss insourcing vs. outsourcing and the possible need for offshoring. We think of ways to select the IT functions that can be insourced from offshore, and also look at the popular offshore destinations. We discuss process of managing change, setting up the offshore center, recruiting IT professionals at offshore, and managing the IT professionals at onshore and offshore within the ambit of the global delivery model. Throughout the decision and implementation phases of offshore-insourcing, the focus is on the challenges related to managing IT personnel.

The Impact of Agile Methods on Managing IT Professionals

This chapter examines the potential for agile methods to provide mechanisms to deal with the software development environment that has evolved in response to the inadequacies of traditional, heavyweight development approaches. A framework is proposed which identifies three major areas of organizational impact that require management attention when undertaking system development in the new environment. This is followed by a detailed examination of the constructs within those three main areas, and assesses the potential for agile methods to address those issues. The current literature and empirical research into agile methods (and eXtreme Programming in particular) underpins the proposals for dealing with contemporary software development challenges. The authors hope that understanding the environment from the perspective of the framework will assist managers in their perception of the challenges of contemporary software development, and provide them with a firm basis on which to consider the adoption of agile methods.

Increasing the Effectiveness of IT Management through Psychological Awareness

Largely because of the potential for Internet connectivity, the area of electronic commerce has been proliferating since the start of the century. In this context, IT professionals are being counted on to provide central and impactful systems with a capacity for competitive advantage. In other areas of intense IT usage, we have also seen increasing emphasis on systems with critical impact. There is a need to be original and creative, yet precise and timely. The more IT workers produce, the more is demanded of them. A number of sources are highlighting the reality of impending and widespread IT burnout. Thus, IT management is faced with the imperative of eliciting high-quality work from an overburdened workforce. To aid in this endeavor, it is here suggested that development of multi-dimensional psychological awareness among those managing and those managed be given serious consideration.

Staffing Electronic Commerce Projects

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) personnel are instrumental in developing and maintaining electronic commerce programs and projects within firms. In spite of the dot-com bust, the number of firms developing and using e-commerce for interactions with customers and suppliers is growing. Personnel competence as individuals and as a group can be a decisive force in determining the level of success of e-commerce projects. In this chapter, we present a conceptual framework as an extension and reformulation of several of the currently active fit theories of human resource management and industrial psychology. We propose consideration of five categories of skills that should be present in organizational e-commerce workforce (human computer interface, data storage and analysis, transaction/application development, infrastructure, and project management). Finally, based on the adjusted concepts of fit, we present a set of propositions showing expected relationships between organizational and fit related variables on workforce outcomes.

Managing IT Professionals

Attracting and retaining top IT talent is a major concern for most organizations. In the early part of this decade when the dotcom boom turned to a bust, Y2K was over and the recession hit, everything came to a dramatic halt. Today the economy is improving and the hiring of IT staff is on the rebound. Today new skills are required to compete in a global economy where organizations have new alternatives to choose from. Finding IT professionals with specific skills is no easy feat these days. Today’s job skills require strong technical skills and also excellent business, industry, communication, marketing and negotiating abilities. This chapter will focus on the results of recent research and their implications to IT human resource considerations. It also discusses what IT professionals are seeking in a position, the retention of IT talent, stress in workplace, and IT career development.

Cultural Diversity Challenges

This chapter discusses cultural diversity challenges in globally distributed software development and the implications for educating and managing the future global information technology workforce. It argues that the work practices of global software development are facing a variety of challenges associated with cultural diversity, which are manifested in and can be analyzed from three dimensions: the work environment of global software development, the globally distributed knowledge workers, and the global software development work. It further articulates how cultural diversity is manifested in these three dimensions. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of developing cultural awareness and cultural diversity understanding as important skills for the future information technology workforce.

Gender and the Information Technology Workforce

Despite increases of women in the labor force, females are largely under-represented in the American IT workforce. Among the challenges that managers face in addressing the under representation of women in the IT workforce is the identification of an appropriate theory as a basis for understanding data about gender and IT in order to reverse the gender imbalance. Hence, the purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the managerial implications of theory choice when addressing the under representation of women in the IT workforce. We provide an overview of the three main theoretical perspectives, the essentialist theory, the social construction theory, and the individual differences theory of gender and IT, which are used to understand and investigate the IT gender gap. We then make the argument that the essentialist and social construction theories do not provide the analytical robustness required to pay attention to more nuanced managerial recommendations. Finally, we demonstrate how the individual differences theory of gender and IT can significantly contribute to the reconfiguration of analytical knowledge of the IT gender gap and spur innovative management policies.