Measuring Transactive Memory Systems among IT Outsourcing Project Team Members at Malaysia Public Agencies: New Scale Development

摘要

IT outsourcing project is a knowledge intensive process with diversified knowledge and competencies are required among the teams. Team members are required to transfer, coordinate and process knowledge resources effectively. Recent research reported that half of outsourcing projects often failed because of insufficient knowledge transfer and the lesson learnt resulting from ineffective transactive memory system (TMS) among team members. Besides, there is limited research reported on the contribution of transactive memory system (TMS) for knowledge transfer in IT outsourcing particularly among Malaysian Public Agencies. Hence, the issue highlights the importance of understanding that the organizational memory system can effectively promote knowledge transfer and facilitate the matching of task, resources, and people. To address this gap, the study aims at developing a new measurement scale of TMS that is more in accordance with the context as well as routine-based measurement for direct TMS measures rather than indirect measurement used by many researchers. The study employed survey method to validate the new scale. The questionnaire is distributed among 195 IT personnel at three e-government lead agencies in Malaysia. The result of the study confirmed that there are three main transactive processes in TMS; directory maintenance, coordination and information allocation. Among the TMS routines, the referral, allocation and updating routines significantly shows higher impact towards knowledge transfer. The research contributes to the development of TMS theory particularly, while the enhancement of TMS scale measurement can be used for future studies.