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Globalization Research Center

Globalization has become a buzzword. It requires companies to keep abreast of the changing business environment on several continents, and to appreciate the technological, political, economic and cultural backdrop of any market they seek to enter.

CIO's Globalization Resource Center is a developing network of contacts and information about doing business in an IT-enabled, global economy. We'll match our own knowledge about business strategy and IT in both established and emerging markets with the best outside resources from corporations, media, governments, academia and consultancies.

Global Engineering Methodology Study

This project was supported by a grant from Electronic Data Systems. Gemsteam is a collaborative research program of the Michigan State University Department of Telecommunication and the Case Center for Computer Aided Engineering and Manufacturing, sponsored by EDS. The goal of the research program is to investigate methods for improving the efficiency and quality of engineering design teams in geographically distributed contexts.

One central finding of the study is that, despite the constraints imposed by extreme geographic distance, cultural and disciplinary differences, the distributed teams were able to successfully coordinate their activities using the available communication media. The teams in the study produced several high quality designs during the four month period of collaboration. However, not all media were evaluated and used equally by the teams. Given time-zone differences, asynchronous media were clearly the preferred mode of interacting across locations. Email was the most frequently used medium, with the telephone, fax, and file transfers used as supplements. Internet-based video conferencing was used infrequently as the students found it difficult to use and inconvenient to schedule. Face to face interaction did occur among the MSU-based team members, but was not possible between team members in different locations.

A list of the available technologies for each group are shown in Table 3. Summary and Conclusions of the study are:

• Email was the preffered medium of choice
• Synchronous communication media were not utilized as much as asynchronous media.
• The importance of locational, cultural, and functional differences were the most important factor in terms of amount of communication. Whether one was a mechanical or electrical engineer seemed to make the most difference in communication patterns of these groups.
• In terms of group progress, the telephone was found to be more useful than email.
• These globally teams performed rather well compared to face-to-face teams, scoring 1st and 3rd in a design team competition at MSU.

Results of this research suggest support for an appropriate mix of communication technologies including both synchronous and asynchronous media. Refer to Global Engineering Methodology.