United in IT: Tech Culture Breaks Down Barriers Abroad

  BackBy Deanna Hartley —

It is not uncommon for U.S.-based IT companies to get more than half their revenues from overseas markets, according to the Information Technology Association of America. Information technology has become a globally pervasive industry that goes beyond just computing and technology.

Over the years, IT has impacted more than the bottom line of large organizations. From the U.S. and the U.K. to India and China, it has influenced the lifestyles and cultures of places from global IT hubs to the world’s poorest regions.

IT as a Working Culture

It is estimated that the IT industry has spawned more than 15 million IT professionals worldwide, according to work by Capers Jones, chief scientist emeritus of Software Productivity Research. “The great challenge of IT in the 21st century is to continually create and sustain jobs,” said John Bostick, CEO of dbaDIRECT.

The international IT industry has evolved over the years to suit different competencies that people of various nationalities bring to the table, said Vivek Nijhon, project director of global sourcing at London-based EquaTerra. “The industry is seeing a lot of the design of applications happening in Sweden, development in India and maintenance in China,” he said.

Having worked in some of the world’s IT hotspots, Alok Shende, director of consulting at Datamonitor in Hyderabad, India, said he has noticed an underlying IT working culture in cities such as San Francisco; Bangalore, India; Singapore; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Shanghai, China. “Common to IT hubs is the economy built around IT business and innovation,” Shende said.

“While the scope and scale between these hubs may vary, essentially they all have a common culture that is young, cosmopolitan in its attitude and focuses on innovation, speed and delivery.”

This doesn’t imply that the IT working culture is standardized across the globe. Nijhon uses firsthand experience and points to nuances in the IT culture of cities even within the same country. For instance, the IT culture in New Delhi tends to be more business-driven rather than technology-driven, Nijhon said. On the other hand, the IT culture of Bangalore, also known as the “IT capital of India,” is client-focused.

Nijhon, who was raised in India, said IT professionals in New Delhi often are more interested in the business impact than the coding behind the program. The culture of the IT sector in Bangalore, on the other hand, tends to be customized to client accounts.

“[For instance], if you meet an individual who is supporting a bank in its technology needs, the person might be as aggressive as a banker and also conservative when it comes to suggesting new changes,” he said. “On the other hand, [if you speak] to a person working on a Google account, you will find an individual who is ready to take risks to implement new technology.”

IT as a Communications Conduit

It is an understatement to say that IT’s effects are far-reaching; they facilitate communication and have the capacity to blur international boundaries and cultural divides. “Information technology has shrunk the world and brought people from different walks of life together by way of e-mails, chat, weblogs, as well as community and interest portals,” Shende noted.

This can be especially true for people such as Mark Sunner, chief security analyst at MessageLabs, whose career has allowed him to travel internationally for several decades. Though he is based in the U.K., Sunner claims to live out of e-mail and said that access to the Internet is increasingly important because “you never feel like you’re on your own with e-mail and Internet access.”

This can be demonstrated by the fact that, as soon as a flight lands anywhere in the world, passengers reach for their cell phones or BlackBerrys to connect with people and catch up from the temporary lack of correspondence. “The ways in which people interact, not just IT people but more heavy residential Internet users, are sort of the same,” Sunner said. “They want to do the same things: search, send e-mails. It’s all about communication.”

As the world grows more technology savvy, people expect more than modem or dial-up access, especially considering the types and quantity of documents that are sent back and forth. While international travelers expect Wi-Fi to be guaranteed in many countries, there are more remote locations where those who rely heavily on technology might be taken aback.

Sunner, for instance, was surprised to find himself sans access to both Wi-Fi and his BlackBerry in Oman, a country bordering the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. It took him a week to recover from the backlog of e-mails and messages created by the 48-hour lack of connectivity.

Then there are countries where people have trouble getting foreign technological devices to work. After an unplanned stopover at Osaka airport in Japan to avoid a typhoon, Sunner and his fellow passengers experienced technical difficulties when trying to notify family and friends of their whereabouts using triband cell phones.

“It seems that Japan has its own mechanisms to accommodate cell phone users, and phones that work in all territories including Japan are quite rare,” Sunner said. In addition to the technical difficulties, Sunner ran into written and verbal language barriers in Japan and would have had to resort to using Wi-Fi to make a call had he not found British currency on his person to call his office in London.

Despite the fact that IT professionals are spread across the globe and speak a variety of languages, they communicate through a common language. “IT professionals speak a common language — computing — and IT can help reduce the culture divide,” Nijhon said. That said, he noted that most IT professionals in countries such as India, China and Eastern Europe speak enough English to support IT discussions. “The somewhat similar business experience of IT is a starting point to mitigate cultural differences within the field,” Bostick added.

Nijhon calls attention to a much bigger obstacle than language. “It’s easy to solve language and cultural barriers with training,” he said. What he views as the biggest obstacle facing IT professionals is their mindset toward business. “There needs to be a focus on the final business outcome rather than the impact of coding they are performing,” Nijhon said. “They need to move from an IT-manager mindset to a business-manager mindset.”

Impact of IT on Society

It would be short-sighted to say that IT doesn’t affect culture. In some cases, a booming IT industry can go so far as to culturally revolutionize a city. Shende cites Bangalore as a classic example. Known as “the Silicon Valley of India,” Bangalore is a software-development hotspot that has long been home to a mix of large Indian software companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies, as well as Western IT companies. The infiltration of IT has caused the city to see an influx of trained IT professionals, and thereby a shift in the general population from primarily retirees to urban, middle-class youth.