Information Technology Offshoring

The decision to source software development to an overseas firm (offshoring) is looked at frequently in simple economic terms - it's cheaper, and skilled labor is easier to find. In practice, however, offshoring is fraught with difficulties. As well as the considerable challenge of controlling projects at a distance, there are differences in culture, language, business methods, politics, and many other issues to contend with. Nevertheless, as many firms have discovered, the benefits of getting it right are too great to ignore. This book explains everything you need to know to put offshoring into practice, avoid the pitfalls, and develop effective working relationships. It covers a comprehensive range of the important offshoring issues: from ROI to strategy, from SLA to culture, from country comparisons to provider marketing. Written for CTOs, CIOs, consultants, and other IT executives, this book is also an excellent introduction to sourcing for business students.

This book is generated from a thesis written by this author in 2009 and provides an insight into the myth that is offshore outsourcing. The Information Technology field has often been criticized for its offshore outsourcing strategy and the negative impact it has on the American Economy. This book however, will provide insight and data gathered over the last twenty years, to show the true effects of offshore outsourcing. The advantages provided by offshore outsourcing are evident through the research in this book. Are we really losing all our jobs to offshore outsourcing? The rapid deployment of call centers to Asia Pac, has many claiming that all our jobs are overseas, this book gives you an insight into how globalization has affected the Information Technology field. The results might surprise you.

Outsourcing, as a business strategy, has been adopted for a very long time now. Offshoring, a subset of outsourcing, gained prevalence during the late eighties of the last century. Over the years, IT has evolved from being a back office procedure to a decisive and strategic paradigm, the rapid development of which has impacted, on a global scale, the way businesses conduct their operations. Offshoring has played a major role in bringing about this transformation and helping establish an industry of epic proportions in terms of geographical spread, operational diversity and impact on business and social aspects the world over. While popular perception identifies offshoring as the most effective way to trim business costs. This is not true for many reasons; the primary being, one size does not fit all and the cost-saving benefits are not always realized. The first half of this thesis aims at providing a better understanding of the IT offshoring industry by looking at the different types of outsourcing and offshoring, certain new trends that are taking form and have the potential to gain prevalence in the future, perceived benefits of IT offshoring and issues that need to be considered by an IT business before it adopts offshoring as a strategy to achieve its goals. Also, in order to demonstrate the impact of offshoring, we discuss certain implications of it on the computer science community with regard to computer science education. From a client business's perspective, there seem to be no consistent offshoring models to depict the big picture of how offshoring actually takes place. We present a general offshoring model in the latter half of the thesis that incorporates two-stage cost benefit analysis to identify candidate processes for offshoring. We then move on to present an IT process-offshoring specific model that has been derived from other models adopted by a number of client businesses and service providers, albeit customized to reflect specific process-offshoring needs. We call it the staged process-offshoring model. Our model is different in the sense that it establishes a balanced view of process-offshoring events taking place at both ends of the offshoring spectrum as opposed to presenting just strategies employed by the service provider to fulfill requirements of the client. With the model being structured in layers, each layer is present on the onshore and offshore end, which contributes towards the construction of a regulated offshoring management architecture in addition to demonstrating a job creation potential not just at the service provider location but, more essentially, at the client location.

This new volume in the "Advances in Management Information Systems" series presents the latest cutting-edge knowledge in IT outsourcing. As part of the growing business trend to outsourcing various operations, IT outsourcing both determines the governance of a vital organizational function and influences the processes of exploitation and exploration in all other functions of an enterprise. In keeping with the mission of the "AMIS" series, the editors of this volume have framed the domain of research and practice broadly. "Information Technology Outsourcing" provides leading edge research on both the variety of decisions regarding the outsourcing of IS services and the management of the relationship with service suppliers.

"This book covers a wide range of topics involved in the outsourcing of information technology through state-of-the-art collaborations of international field experts"--Provided by publisher.

"This book discusses the considerations and implications surrounding the outsourcing and offshoring of professional services, such as software development computer-aided design, and healthcare, from multiple global perspectives. This book, offers industry professionals, policymakers, students, and educators with a balance between a broad overview and detailed analysis of offshore outsourcing, would make an invaluable addition to any reference library"--Provided by publisher.

For decades, outsourcing has been a major international phenomenon in business. The areas of Technology, Information Technology and Management represent a unique case for outsourcing both in terms of benefits and potential interorganisational problems. This fully updated text has been brought up to date with this new landscape, including discussion of Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Things, cloud computing, low code and DevOps and agile. With a range of new global case studies in manufacturing, logistics, chemical industry and cloud services, this textbook offers a strong grounding in real-world industrial experience that effectively combines theory with practice. Uniquely, this book focuses on both sides of the outsourcing relationship, providing a balanced exploration of the ways in which these partnerships can be managed successfully. Accessible and cutting-edge, the third edition of Managing Information Technology Outsourcing provides an in-depth, practical perspective on this important and far-reaching challenge in information technology management. It is an ideal text for students, academics and practitioners alike.

Bringing together theoretical and empirical studies from the Journal of Information Technology, this book provides a definitive guide to research discovered on the growing global sourcing phenomenon. Paying particular attention to Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), theoretical chapters explore insightful ways of thinking about the different facets of outsourcing, and provide useful information to practitioners and researchers. Empirical chapters report the findings of 405 major research studies into the risks and successes of relationships between customer and vendor, the development of trust in these relationships, the factors affecting locations for offshoring, and specialized offshoring organizations such as captive centres. In this comprehensive study, the editors present an expert review of the historical development of this field, and offer analysis of emerging findings and practices for the future.

There are three stages to outsourcing: The first occurred at the dawn of industrial era in the 19th century, where mass production for consumption by many, became the norm and simple domestic means could not meet such demands. With the cost of labor soaring in developed countries, manufacturing of products started moving to countries like China to take advantage of labor arbitrage in the 1900s. This is the second stage of outsourcing. This book addresses issues and challenges in the third stage of outsourcing whose focus is on movement of services at electronic speed, utilizing the Internet platform.The book includes short essay questions, multiple choice questions, mini-cases at the end of most chapters and glossary of terms. It can also serve as a good reference book for practitioners.