The World IT Project: A Long Journey in the Making

The World IT Project, the largest study of its kind in the IS academic field, was conceptualized more than a decade ago. Long time in the making, the project was motivated by the dominant and pervasive bias in IS research towards American and Western views. In very broad terms, the World IT Project captures the organizational, technological, and individual issues of IT employees across the world and relates them to cultural and organizational variables. The project was officially launched in 2013 and is now in the publication phase. Because of the enormous global scale of the project, a single or even two or three publications cannot fully describe our findings. This book is a major publication that describes and analyzes the organizational, technological, and individual issues of IT employees in the 37 countries that were included in the project.This first chapter provides the necessary background for the remaining country chapters, which are co-authored with specific country teams. In here, we describe the goals and objectives of the World IT Project, its general framework and major research questions, the relevant literature and theoretical background, methodological details, expected outcomes and publications, and important contributions. The goal is to provide a world view of IT issues that will be relevant to stakeholders at the firm, national, and international levels.