Knowledge coordination in distributed software management: An analysis of breakdowns in multimodal virtual meetings

Software organizations are increasingly relying on cross-organizational and cross-border collaboration, requiring effective coordination of distributed knowledge. However, such coordination is challenging due to spatial separation, diverging communities-of-practice, and unevenly distributed resources. We have therefore studied virtual meetings among the managers of a cross-organizational and cross-border joint venture who was highly dedicated to multimodal communication. Since coordination is most clearly noticeable when it is lacking, we investigated knowledge coordination by analyzing communication breakdowns on recordings of their combined teleconferencing and real-time collaborative modeling. As a result, we offer theoretical propositions that explain how distributed software managers can deal with communication breakdowns and effectively coordinate knowledge through multimodal virtual meetings.