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Social networking and media reflects people’s need to be connected, to share, to be members of communities, and to collaborate. It supports social interaction and uses scalable web-based technologies. Although modern social media are new phenomenon, the same physical networks have always operated – only the tools are changed. It is also easy to see that the social communities operate in private life, whereas traditional networking is related to business – the direction of the adoption is undoubtedly from the private life to business. The adoption speed is accelerated by recruiting members of the younger generation to responsible positions in organisations. This paper opens up discussion on the use of social networking. The framework characterising the differences between the generations and the characteristics of modern enterprise are introduced. The purpose is to increase understanding of the changes in information and communication technology (ICT) intensive organisations and in society.

AbstractCommitment is the manifestation of trust. Therefore the building of trust in global software engineering (SE) companies is a relevant question to study. The objective of this research is to explore the trust-building processes in global SE from a cultural perspective. In this research, staff from five large multinational SE companies were interviewed. In the conceptual part of the article, firstly the domain of SE is introduced, secondly there is a discussion on the concept of trust and trust-building processes and thirdly, cultural dimensions affecting trust-building processes are examined. Finally, findings from the case companies are discussed.

One of the trends in software engineering is globalisation. Software development is expert work made in closely collaborating teams. The most natural way to do this kind of work is to implement it in local teams. Distribution of expert work increases the grade of difficulty; an additional grade of difficulty appears if the organisational parts represent different cultural backgrounds. The organisations that are distributed and multicultural must be adaptive. Adaptation can be done in two ways: either to adapt the people to the organisation or to adapt the processes of the organisation to take into account the differences. There is also a lot of knowledge available concerning the differences between cultures. The aim of this paper is to analyse multicultural information and communication technology (ICT) companies. The viewpoints discussed cover the global organisation as an adaptive and learning network and the maturity of the global organisation.

Productivity management is a challenge for software engineering companies and, in this regard, there is a current trend toward globalization. Via acquisitions and mergers, business has become international and employs different national cultures. Therefore, the focus of this article is on the understanding of cultural differences affecting productivity in globalized software production. The relation between productivity and non coding activities in software development projects has not been proven. Software development is expert work, typically made in closely collaborating local teams and global distribution of expert work increases the degree of difficulty. In this paper, the authors analyze multicultural ICT companies from their productivity perspective through the lens of cultural differences. The purpose of this study is to report findings based on general cultural studies and reported experiences that seem to affect productivity in the software industry. Some company cases are also described and analyzed.

Enterprise migration is the process in which two or more companies are merged into one. In practice, it means that different company cultures are unified, information systems of the merged companies are renewed, working practices are unified, and the administrative structure will change, etc. From the employees' point of view, it is a question of learning and adaptation process. This adaptation can be supported by proactive operations: training of the staff and the well-prepared integration of the information systems. Our paper is based on the foundations of two 'frameworks' – the first is an understanding of enterprise migration and the second is the adaptation process in the case of mergers and acquisitions. In the adaptation phase, the goal is seen as a learning organisation and the adaptation support as learning/training activities. The integration of information systems (IS) of the merged organisations plays a central role in our paper. We are developing a framework that provides a means to decompose the complexity in connection with the migration process. In addition, some migration and adaptation cases are introduced briefly and analysed – based on publicly available information.

The applicability of information technology depends on the various aspects. During the past few decades the basic solution to use computers has changed from single user computing to batch processing and time sharing, and further from personal computing to today’s global networks of local client server based systems. The most powerful factors having effect on today’s computing are the changes in the processing capacity of computers, transmission capacity of networks and mass storage solutions. The changes in technology have further consequences on the application sectors of computing: the sector dominating the change power of IT has moved from administration to processes and further to the use of IT in products (embedded systems). Changes can be described as IT waves. Software engineering has adapted in these waves: on the one hand the new capability of computing has provided new opportunities to software engineers, on the other hand changing the base of solutions demands new tools and methods. The aim of this paper is to look at the world of software engineers from different viewpoints and especially to point out the change of cultural aspects in their daily work.