Impact of technology spill over on expertise level of growing software firms

Abstract

Technical expertise is an important determinant of skills and competitiveness of a software services firm. Customers, investors, and employees of a firm are impacted by and are interested in knowing the level of technical expertise of a firm. Before we delve into how technical expertise can be gained, we need to define what constitutes technical expertise. In this project, we propose that technical expertise is a combination of three components: Technical skills, Tools skills, and Process skills. The next question we attempt to answer is: what factors lead to increase in technical expertise? We propose four main drivers which lead to gain in technical expertise: Hiring, Technology spill over through customer interaction, Own Learning, and Training. Our methodology is to put the above questions into a survey, which is administered to small software services firms. We ask the participants to rate the relative importance of technical expertise components, and the impact of expertise drivers on technical expertise, in context of projects done in their firms. Based on survey results, we find out the importance of various expertise drivers, and especially how technology spill over impacts technical expertise of the firms. We then highlight insights found from survey about measure of technical expertise, and ways in which expertise and productivity can be enhanced.