Research On Knowledge Transfer And Performance Of Software Outsourcing Based On Transactive Memory

At present, software outsourcing has become the tendency of software industry development of China. Compared to other industries, software outsourcing project is less dependent on material resources, its success is more dependent on the project team's knowledge ability. Knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer in software outsourcing project team is the key to project's success. From the vendor's perspective, during the process of project development, they need to pay attention to not only project success, but also the accumulation of skills experience, improvement of team management ability, etc. of knowledge transfer performance. Due to the advantage of transactive memory system in explaining team cognitive formation mechanism and characterization of distributed expertise, it has been used as a theoretical framework for analyzing the knowledge processing during dynamic problem solving of knowledge-based team by researchers. Combing the collaborative characteristics of software outsourcing team and related theory research, this study suggests transactive memory system is an effective knowledge transfer mode if software outsourcing project team.Starting from the transactive memory system, taking software outsourcing project team as research object, and based on the review of literatures, we built the theoretical model and proposed the corresponding research hypotheses. Based on the investigation interview of 28 vendors of software outsourcing and survey data of 172 software outsourcing project teams, first we used the statistical software SPSS13.0 by descriptive statistics. Then, we tested the theoretical mode and hypotheses we proposed by structure equation mode based on the partial least squares (PLS). The results showed the relationship among three behavior characteristic dimensions (specialization, credibility, and coordination) of transactive memory system, project complexity (structural complexity, dynamitic complexity), and vendor's team performance. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Transactive memory system is an effective knowledge transfer mode in software outsourcing project team. Effective transactive memory system can play a positive role on knowledge transfer performance and project success of vendor's team. It can help to improve the efficiency of information exchange and ability of knowledge integration as to improve the quality of projects. (2) Software project complexity played a moderating effect between transactive memory system and team performance, transactive memory system played different roles on team performance under different project complexities.The conclusion above can help to promote the application development of transactive memory system in software outsourcing project team knowledge management, and provide theoretical contributions and management apocalypse for the vendor to transfer knowledge effectively. But due to the limit of author's knowledge structures, time and energy, this research also exists some shortage and need fellow-up study in the future.