Critical Capabilities for Offshore Outsourcing of Information Systems

No Abstrac

Key to Success of Offshore Outsourcing

With the proliferating growth in technology and Innovation and the necessity to use new technology skills, outsourcing has become a notable trend in the IT industry. Characterized by USP\u27s like cost-effectiveness and timeliness, outsourcing companies has surged tremendously in the last decade. However, amidst the entire buzz, outsourcing has contributed to some major failures at recent times (A & M, 2016). That has even made organizations to critically think before going forward with an off-shore outsourcing company. A substantial issue on organizational capability and on-time delivery has questioned the very foundation of its efficiency. This has now leaded to surface some very extreme opinions about outsourcing, with rave reviews on good/ bad. Software Development outsourcing encompasses a contract based voluntary relationship between vendors and clients, wherein a client outsources a part or all the business activities to the concerned vendor. However, an offshore outsourcing demands completely different capabilities as against a domestic outsourcing. To begin with, firms associating with off-shore outsourcing must need to compete against language constraints, cultural differences, contrasts in time zones and also the organizational structures. Next, an off-shore outsourcing has a far greater impact than a domestic outsourcing with the above constraints introduced before. With regards to the core knowledge capabilities, there calls for probable risks so as to understand the level of efficiency of the outsourcing companies (A & M, 2016). Together with the differences in legal laws, risks related to data security, privacy and intellectual property can be critical too. Such disadvantages in outsourcing can be a high limiting factor to the growth of these offshore outsourcing, hence it must, therefore, be necessary to understand the level of efficiency of an offshore outsourcing team before relying on them

Virtual Project Management Of Globally Outsourced IT Projects

The existing literature on how globally outsourced information technology (IT) projects are reliant on technology for virtual project management was extended by presenting a new framework for virtual project management and analyzing the current internet-based collaborative tools that facilitate their effectiveness. This assertion derives from an effort to answer the following research question: How are globally outsourced IT projects reliant on technology for virtual project management

Client’s Readiness Assessment Success Factors for Outsourcing Software Projects

IT services such as software development, application maintenance, disaster recovery, help desk, network and operations are critical and highly demanded to better support the operations and management of organizations, especially in the government sector. The government sector faces various problems in providing IT services due to constraints or lack of knowledge, skills and expertise, human resource and technology. Thus, IT services need to be outsourced to overcome these problems. While the need for outsourcing has increased, reported weaknesses of the outsourcing activities are attributed to issues such as project rationale and the unclear role of the project team, lack of involvement of subject matter experts and users in the early stages, lack of control and lack of emphasis on quality. These issues indicate the low readiness level of the client’s organization to take up outsourcing activities. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the contributing readiness factors that clients should comply with in order to ensure the success of outsourcing software projects. Systematic reviews and content analysis were employed in order to propose a conceptual model. There are 27 factors identified and classified into 9 dimensions.  There are six internal dimensions were identified as contributing to the client’s readiness such as strategy, people, organization culture, process, technology and management whilst three other external dimensions include the government, market and people. The outcome of this study is a software outsourcing readiness model that will assist software practitioners in designing effective outsourcing software project strategies. The model is important since the agencies have difficulty in addressing their readiness level as part of the implementation plan and to avoid project failure

Antecedents of success in IS offshoring projects - Proposal for an empirical research study

The paper presents a research model and a measurement instrument for a research-in-progress study on the antecedents of success in IS offshoring projects. In this empirical-confirmatory study, we intendto analyse the impact of the constructs “offshoring expertise”, “trust in offshore service provider”, “project suitability”, “knowledge transfer”, and “liaison quality” on offshore project success. Constructs and indicators are derived from an extensive literature review. We plan to formulate astructural equation model and to test it using partial least squares (PLS) as an analysis technique. Our research model addresses the paucity of research that quantitatively examines offshoring success

Who is Doing What: The Impact of Task and Role Documentation on Outsourcing Service Quality

Our research contributes to the quest for management action items that drive outsourcing management success. We hypothesize and empirically show that a certain piece of IT governance, the explicit documentation of roles and responsibilities of staff residing in the client firm’s retained organization contributes to social alignment in terms of interaction quality, shared knowledge, and trust between the client firm’s business and side and the outsourcing vendor. Our model is quantitatively tested by using data from 171 IT outsourcing arrangements in the German banking industry. We show that the documentation of tasks and responsibilities affects the service quality delivered by the vendor in terms of reliability and responsiveness, and that this impact is fully mediated by both client-internal social alignment and vendor/client alignment. This result represents a piece for helping practitioners to develop a better understanding of how to design their outsourcing governance to maintain and improve ongoing outsourcing relationships

Review of the IS Offshoring Literature: The Role of Cross-Cultural Differences and Management Practices

There is a world-wide trend towards global cross-cultural networks of outsourcing relationships that are enabled by the extensive use of information- and communication technology (ICT). While ICT reduces national boundaries of global collaboration, cultural differences between outsourcers and vendor firms in offshore locations pose unique management challenges. This literature review analyzes the role of cultural differences between client and vendor companies and management practices in the information systems (IS) offshore outsourcing context. The analysis of the existing IS literature reveals limitations concerning prior conceptualizations of culture and cultural differences and provides ideas for future research on the effect of cultural differences as well as cultural, relationship, knowledge, and project management techniques. In particular, the existing literature can be grouped into formal and informal mechanisms as well as learning issues. Future research could adopt a more integrated and balanced perspective, taking into account formal and informal mechanisms and analyzing the interplay with learning issues

The Role of Client-internal Social Linkages for Outsourcing Success – An SNA Approach

What is the role of a firm’s internal social relations between business departments and IT unit for the success of its IT outsourcing relationship? In this paper, we propose that the relationship between business and IT of a firm is crucial for achieving effective outsourcing management and for enabling the vendor to deliver the services as demanded. Since the business side of the client firm represents the users of the information systems but the IT unit represents the interface to the outsourcing vendor firm, interaction between both units is proposed to be required for maintaining a good outsourcing relationship. Based on a survey in the German Banking Industry and by adopting a Social Network Analysis Approach which captures the interaction structure within the client firm and thus represents an innovative scale to outsourcing research, we show that tight social linkages within the client firm lead to higher service quality achieved by the vendor firm

Antecedents and drivers of IT-business strategic alignment: Empirical validation of a theoretical model

Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Despite the documented positive effects of strategic alignment on organizational success, only a few organizations consider themselves in alignment. Although numerous studies exist about how to accomplish IT-business alignment, empirical studies based on strong theories have been rare in the literature. This study attempts to fulfill this gap by proposing and empirically validating a comprehensive strategic alignment model. Drawing on prior literature, we identified five antecedents of alignment; centralization, formalization, shared domain knowledge, successful IT history and relationship management. We further hypothesized that the effects of these antecedents are mediated by two drivers of alignment, which are conceptualized as the level of connection of IT and business planning and the level of communication between IT and business managers. Using survey data and structural equation modeling methodology, we show that both drivers had significant effects on alignment, and the effect of connection is about twice that of communications. Our findings also confirm the effects of all antecedents except centralization. Overall, the main contribution of this study is the development and empirical validation of a comprehensive strategic alignment model, providing a more ample prescriptive insight for managing IT-business strategic alignment

Electronic Medical Records Application Development: Perspectives of the Service Provider

Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) is a relatively new phenomenon and refers to the use of computer applications to store, process, and use clinical, administrative, and financial information among various health care entities. HIT is widely regarded as a key to improving the quality of healthcare in the United States and potentially reducing its cost. Yet, its implementation is a continuous challenge for the healthcare industry. One of the key applications of HIT is Electronic Medical Records (EMR). The implementation of an EMR system may result in improved and more efficient care and patient safety, but it may also incur additional costs. Furthermore, if the development of the application is undertaken by an offshore vendor, it adds another layer of complexity. This research case documents the experiences in the development and implementation of an EMR system for a U.S. client by an offshore vendor. While client experiences abound in the literature, this study is unique in that it draws from the perspective of the service provider. Key findings of the study show that the major issues related to EMR development by an offshore vendor include gaining domain knowledge, requirements generation, and access to expertise. Like offshoring projects in general, client-vendor communication remains perennially important. Beyond EMR, this vendor's critical success factors in HIT projects offshore development additionally include scope containment, need for a client liaison, and managing non-functional expectations