Outsourcing and offshore : an analysis of the academic literature

Outsourcing and offshore are strategies adopted by businesses to manage their Information Sys­tems. There has been an increase in the volume of literature devoted to outsourcing and offshore during the past years. This paper provides a review of articles about outsourcing and offshore published in various journals. This list of journals was obtained by consulting the Journal Citation Report with an impact factor of over 3.0 in the last five years. This research was a survey with data collection from the following journals: Information & Management, Information Systems Journal, Information Systems Research, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of Management Information Systems and MIS Quarterly. The results obtained are: the majority of articles have two or three authors (83,9%); the majority of co-authors work in different universities (73,8%); the majority of the authors are associated with a USA-based uni­versity (54,5%). The result of this research assists in the identification of researchers and research gaps in this subject

How Client Capabilities, Vendor Configuration and Location Impact BPO Outcomes

Despite the increasing use of onshore and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO), a comprehensive literature review [38] finds that there has been limited empirical research on BPO outcomes. This article responds to the call for research by developing and testing a conceptual model for BPO outcomes using data from 50 firms publicly traded in the U.S., including 38 firms in the Forbes Global 2000. We find that client firm capabilities, vendor configuration, and country location lead to interesting tradeoffs in the BPO quality, cost, and time outcomes. For example, while multi-sourcing offers advantages such as risk mitigation, client firms encounter reduced BPO time benefits when they use multiple vendors. While onshore BPO can lead to an improved quality, higher onshore labor costs result in lower BPO cost savings. And while offshore destinations such as India offer lower labor costs, time zone differences lead to reduced BPO time benefits

Offshore Business Processing Outsourcing by Australian Enterprises to Service Providers Located in India

The primary research question for this PhD was: “What are the key factors that contribute to the success of offshore business process outsourcing (OBPO) by Australian and international organisations to service providers located in India and the Philippines?” A qualitative research design in the positivist paradigm was adopted, involving longitudinal case studies of five client companies. A primary contribution was identification of critical success factors for management of OBPO at the individual company level