Exploring the Collaboration Model of Offshore outsourcing: A Study of IT Software Development

The practice of offshore software development is now as part of global trend adopted by some Western companies. The software development projects operating under geographically-separated settings present the tremendous challenges and require collaboration-intensive activities. This study examines the factors contributing to the success and failure within the context of offshoring software development projects. Furthermore, this study intends to develop a collaboration model for offshore software development that describes the key components operating under distributed development environment. The initial results and limitations of research are also discussed

Revitalising the Outsourcing Discourse within the Boundaries of Firms Debate

Despite outsourcing has been at the core of managerial practice and literature for a long time, still authors do not agree on a clear understanding of the overall outsourcing process. This article answers two main questions, relevant to researchers and practitioners: 1.What are the main findings so far in outsourcing literature? 2. What do we still need to learn? Through a comprehensive review of the literature, we offer systematization of the existent body of knowledge on outsourcing, its implications on firms’ boundaries, and the theoretical challenges. In conclusion, implications for managers are drawn

Value Appropriation in Business Process Outsourcing

We examine the relative value gains between client and vendor firms following the announcement of a BPO deal. We posit that the gains for the vendor are higher than those of the client when clients outsource primary tasks with intent to access vendor capabilities and when the clients outsource peripheral tasks with intent to minimize costs. We also posit that the gains for the clients are higher than those of the vendor when the clients outsource primary tasks with intent to minimize costs and when the clients outsource peripheral tasks to access vendor capabilities. Using an event study methodology we examine 221 BPO contracts between the years 2000 and 2013 to test our hypotheses. In general we found that, when clients outsourced with intent as cost reduction, the vendors gained relative to the client for both primary and peripheral tasks. We interpret and discuss these findings and research implications

Taxonomy of Technological IT Outsourcing Risks: Support for Risk Identification and Quantification

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in IT outsourcing as it promises companies many economic benefits. In recent years, IT paradigms, such as Software-as-a-Service or Cloud Computing using third-party services, are increasingly adopted. Current studies show that IT security and data privacy are the dominant factors affecting the perceived risk of IT outsourcing. Therefore, we explicitly focus on determining the technological risks related to IT security and quality of service characteristics associated with IT outsourcing. We conducted an extensive literature review, and thoroughly document the process in order to reach high validity and reliability. 149 papers have been evaluated based on a review of the whole content and out of the finally relevant 68 papers, we extracted 757 risk items. Using a successive refinement approach, which involved reduction of similar items and iterative re-grouping, we establish a taxonomy with nine risk categories for the final 70 technological risk items. Moreover, we describe how the taxonomy can be used to support the first two phases of the IT risk management process: risk identification and quantification. Therefore, for each item, we give parameters relevant for using them in an existing mathematical risk quantification model

A Survey and Analysis of the Literature on Information Systems Outsourcing

With the development and penetration of business information systems, information systems outsourcing (IS Outsourcing) has attracted more and more interests from both managers and IT vendors. Meanwhile, there is an increasing number of theoretical research papers in academic journals. This paper reviews major theoretical research papers in this area and classifies them from the perspectives of research topics, research methods, journal categories, and theoretical foundations. Based on this review, we propose some directions for future research in IS outsourcing

Panel: Why do we toil? Benefiting research at the cost of practice or vice versa?

In this paper, we present a systematic literature review in the field of IT Outsourcing with a focus on risk management. The source material of the review consists of 97 high quality journal articles published in 18 journals between 2001 and September 2008. Besides an analysis of related work, this review provides an overview of applied research methods and theories in the field of IT Outsourcing. The articles are then analyzed from a risk management point of view to highlight key risk factors and their specific impact on IT Outsourcing. Identified risk factors are further analyzed in order to assign each risk factor to the phases of a typical IT Outsourcing process (life-cycle). The results of the review show that empirical research is the most applied method and that action research and reference modelling have not been used at all so far. Furthermore, elements of a research agenda are discussed in order to determine further steps to the construction of a reference model for risk management in IT Outsourcing. This paper mainly aims at an audience of experienced researchers in the field of IT Outsourcing who are looking for research ideas and at junior scientists (e.g. PhD students) entering this emerging field of research

Effectiveness of information systems outsourcing: An exploratory case study

The objective of this research is to construct an assessment model for measuring the effectiveness of Information Systems (IS) outsourcing. "Lack of expertise" and "cost effectiveness" constitute the major points of motivation for IS outsourcing. Although various decision models and analytical frameworks have been modeled before, the literature is not abundant on a complete qualitative model. In contrast with the decision models which are executed before an outsourcing engagement (a-priori), an effectiveness assessment model will be an a-posteriori guide which will enable the clients to measure their outsourcing performance and re-evaluate their business and management strategies. This paper examines the factors for outsourcing effectiveness through the framework of an exploratory case study for an IS developed by a major Turkish software house for a public organization. © 2012 IADIS

TAXONOMY OF TECHNOLOGICAL IT OUTSOURCING RISKS: SUPPORT FOR RISK IDENTIFICATION AND QUANTIFICATION

The past decade has seen an increasing interest in IT outsourcing as it promises companies many economic benefits. In recent years, IT paradigms, such as Software-as-a-Service or Cloud Computing using third-party services, are increasingly adopted. Current studies show that IT security and data privacy are the dominant factors affecting the perceived risk of IT outsourcing. Therefore, we explicitly focus on determining the technological risks related to IT security and quality of service characteristics associated with IT outsourcing. We conducted an extensive literature review, and thoroughly document the process in order to reach high validity and reliability. 149 papers have been evaluated based on a review of the whole content and out of the finally relevant 68 papers, we extracted 757 risk items. Using a successive refinement approach, which involved reduction of similar items and iterative re-grouping, we establish a taxonomy with nine risk categories for the final 70 technological risk items. Moreover, we describe how the taxonomy can be used to support the first two phases of the IT risk management process: risk identification and quantification. Therefore, for each item, we give parameters relevant for using them in an existing mathematical risk quantification mode