Modern companies are increasingly aware of the significance of information and knowledge, and utilize them actively. They also realize that strategic use of information system is a critical factor to success in business collaboration activities dealing with suppliers and customers. System integration (SI) industry has rapidly grown along with the trend of IT diffusion, however, most SI firms have experienced the lack of IT expertise to new IS projects and the lack of IT competence to new market development.
Information systems development (ISD) project is very difficult to succeed because user companies require their unique and unstructured requests for implementing their information systems. To assure successful achievement of ISD project within planed budget and limited period of time, effective and efficient teamwork quality is required.
This study aims to suggest a research framework to increase efficiency and effectiveness of ISD project team.
To achieve this goal, team virtualness, technology complexity, and task interdependence are drawn from previous studies as project team characteristics. Transactive memory system(TMS) is adopted to increase teamwork quality in ISD project, and to identify its relationship with project team performance.
Survey of this study targets to project team members of IT companies that have participated in ISD or SI project. Sample was made by random sampling method through Korean IT firms list. Data collection is carried out from November, 2014 to June, 2015 through online survey. For increasing the response rate, mail survey was conducted also. 104 data were collected, 21 of which were invalid. Thus 83 valid data were used in the analysis of data.
The results of hypotheses testing show that team virtualness and technology complexity have significant influence on TMS. Task interdependence has no significant influence on TMS. Also, TMS has direct significant influence on project team performance.
The relationship between team virtualness and TMS is similar to prior studies. The result shows that information technology, such as project management tool and online collaboration tool, can be used as one of communication tools in ISD projects. Therefore managers need to recommend the use of project management tools for improvement of TMS development.
Technology complexity has been recognized as a main component of project management. The result of the study shows technology complexity has significant influence on TMS. Technology complexity is expected to facilitate internal communication for development of TMS. TMS increases not only the operational efficiency of project team, but also the effectiveness of the results. The project that has higher level in technology complexity is indeed required more TMS management. TMS management with specialization, credibility, and coordination is considered as an important factor in ISD project team composition.
Task interdependence has no significant influence on TMS, which is due to the lack of enough sample size in this research. To solve the limitations of this study, it needs to expand the sample size sufficient to generalize the results. Also, this study needs to conduct additional studies to identify the relationship between antecedents, influencing factors, and consequences in TMS study. Future research needs to verify the difference of subgroups with the samples of IT firms who have experienced in large-scale project.
Keyword : Information System Development Project, Transactive Memory System, Team Virtualness, Technology Complexity, Task Interdependence, Project Team Performance