Towards a Globalized Software Industry

Software Engineering (SE) represents a remarkable share of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry, which is an important feature of modern well-developed societies. Its importance can be seen on two levels: the industry itself and its indirect consequences for other industries. Although the SE industry represents a reasonably small share of employment (in the home country of the author, 2-3%), the indirect effects raise its economic importance to a much higher level. The role of the ICT industry is also used as one of the Information Society (IS) metrics in country comparisons. One of the leading trends of modern SE is globalization: employees represent different national cultures and the organizations are distributed across several countries. This paper opens the discussion on the topics worth considering when making globalization decisions. The basic hypothesis is that decisions are mainly based on economic factors. The organizational and cultural factors connected to these decisions are not well understood. At the beginning of the paper some background is introduced and the results of related studies are listed. The paper introduces a framework that is useful in planning the globalization of an organization. This paper focuses on the Finnish software industry; however, the same principles are applicable independent of the country or nation.