2008 May 5

Jours fixes take place on the first monday of the month, starting at 5:00 p.m., in room 220C of the university´s main building. 

[Dr. Walter Fernandez, Australian National University]

Largely unexplored in the information systems (IS) literature, metateams are economically important to major corporations and their vendors.  Metateams are potentially powerful organisations resulting from the convergence of information technology (IT) outsourcing, virtual organizations, and increasing demands for global competitiveness.  Metateams are temporary associations of distributed teams working across distance, firms, and cultures, which are commercially bounded by project-specific agreements and enabled by electronic means of communication.

In a business environment demanding innovation, flexibility, and responsiveness, metateams represent a revolution in the way organizations and practitioners conduct major IS projects.  With the assistance of modern communication technologies, metateams can conquer barriers of time and space, enabling collaborative endeavours across a nation or across the globe.  Metateams can efficiently build IS solutions of high complexity, by integrating skills and expertise from different fields and organizations.  However, as this study found, managing metateams presents unique difficulties due to conflicting demands arising from a number of socio-technical factors emerging from the very nature of the metateam organisation.
Based on an empirical research involving three organizations and multiple teams in Australia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, this paper describes the key socio-technical characteristics of metateams and the work they perform.

Keywords: Information systems, international collaborations, collaborative projects, metateams, socio-technical factors.