Supporting Collaboration in the Geographically Distributed Work with Communication Tools in the Remote District SME's

Abstract

In the global software development environment, the companies face the challenges of collaboration. This is particularly challenging for software companies in rural areas, which are typically small companies with limited resources. Often their customers and partners are also geographically dispersed. These factors, in addition to geographical distances, highlight the challenges of communication and collaboration. The focus of this research is to find out how to support geographically dispersed/distributed projects. We addressed this problem by identifying the key categories of collaboration challenges from the literature and conducting an empirical study on companies of the area. The study consists of 30 interviews with 13 companies sited mostly in Finnish rural area, Kainuu region. The company interviews revealed that, instead of the project management purposes, communication tools are needed to provide an infrastructure for collaborative sessions, to interact with colleagues and customers. Limited resources also add the challenges of the communication tools and processes implementation.