Information "bridging" in a global organization

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an interview study investigating the collaborative information-seeking and sharing practices of a global software testing team. A site located in Europe was used as a temporal bridge to help in managing time zome differences between the US, China and India, All sites utilized this bridge for critical, synchronous information seeking. Interviews suggest that bridging can be a taxing job and that the success of the bridging arragement depended upon an intricate balance of temporal, infrastructure and cultural factors.

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