Intra-organizational education in cultural differences in software services

The status of services in the software industry is enhancing. Simultaneously, service production is spreading all over the world in the global environment. This creates international working teams where different cultures´ communication, decision making and working methods meet and diverse. The focus of this paper is on software services globalization, and the need for intra-organizational education in cross-cultural environments it creates. The purpose is to point out the major areas of software service production where proper knowledge of the effects of cross-culturality is crucial for successful cooperation. The findings suggest that cultural factors have a considerable effect in the service production in the studied companies due to the people-oriented nature of the service business. As a result, the critical cross-cultural factors found are presented and compared to the views of the case companies. The paper then discusses the needs and useful methods for cross-cultural education in companies based on these findings. The paper is a part of an ongoing research project STEP, jointly run by Tampere University of Technology Pori unit and University of Jyväskylä.