scholarly journals ‘An end to the job as we know it’: how an IT professional has experienced the uncertainty of IT outsourcing

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 542-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Trusson ◽  
Frankie Woods
Keyword(s):  
Labour Supply ◽  
Shareholder Value ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
It Services ◽  
It Systems ◽  
Career Uncertainty ◽  
Technical Professionals ◽  
The Voice ◽  
It Operations

This article foregrounds the voice of an IT professional who is directly employed by a large British company and who, along with colleagues, is experiencing career uncertainty resulting from a management initiative to replace the established workforce with an alternative labour supply provided by a global IT services company. As an account that reflects the uncertainty of the age, the narrative offers insights into current discussions concerning the contemporary nature and experience of work generally. More specifically it tells of a loss of confidence and status of technical professionals as they are methodically undermined by the confident assertion of a ‘shareholder value’ rhetoric. The suggestion is made that the application of commercial–professional rationality to the outsourcing of IT operations may underestimate the commercial risks associated with the loss of embodied technical knowledge gained across time as IT systems evolve to become complex constructions.

Contracting Mechanisms in the IS/IT Outsourcing Phenomenon

2005 ◽  
pp. 590-595
Author(s):  
Abdulwahed Mohammed Khalfan ◽  
Majed Z. Al-Hajery ◽  
Khamis Al-Gharbi
Keyword(s):  
Business Environment ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
It Services ◽  
Viable Option ◽  
High Quality ◽  
External Vendors ◽  
And Control ◽  
It Operations

As organisations need diverse and high quality IS/IT services to survive and excel in the rapidly changing business environment (Lacity & Willcocks, 2001), regular attempts have been made by organisations to sustain competitiveness through increasing their investments in IS/IT operations and resources. However, this has pushed for pursuing different options and alternatives as organisations strive to maximise their flexibility and control (Lacity, Willcocks, & Feeny, 1996). To accomplish this objective, more and more organisations are constantly looking to IS/IT outsourcing by external vendors as a viable option rather than pursuing in-house IT developments (Lacity & Willcocks).

Contracting Mechanisms in the IS/IT Outsourcing Phenomenon

2008 ◽  
pp. 3013-3024
Author(s):  
Abdulwahed Mohammed Khalfan ◽  
Majed Z. Al-Hajery ◽  
Khamis Al-Gharbi
Keyword(s):  
Business Environment ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
It Services ◽  
Viable Option ◽  
High Quality ◽  
External Vendors ◽  
And Control ◽  
It Operations

As organisations need diverse and high quality IS/IT services to survive and excel in the rapidly changing business environment (Lacity & Willcocks, 2001), regular attempts have been made by organisations to sustain competitiveness through increasing their investments in IS/IT operations and resources. However, this has pushed for pursuing different options and alternatives as organisations strive to maximise their flexibility and control (Lacity, Willcocks, & Feeny, 1996). To accomplish this objective, more and more organisations are constantly looking to IS/IT outsourcing by external vendors as a viable option rather than pursuing in-house IT developments (Lacity & Willcocks).

Measuring and Evaluating Efficiency on IT Outsourcing operations through Data Envelopment Analysis

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
João Correia dos Santos ◽  
Miguel Mira da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Data Envelopment Analysis ◽  
Design Science ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
Data Envelopment ◽  
It Services ◽  
Programming Technique ◽  
Efficient Operation ◽  
Measuring Efficiency

Information Technology (IT) outsourcing is a set of IT services that require providers to manage a long relationship with multiple services that have a high degree of variance between clients. IT outsourcing operational contexts display multi-input and multi-output variables, so managers need guidance on developing suitable approaches in order to identify the set of variables to analyse. This work proposes a model based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is a linear programming technique able to manipulate multiple inputs and outputs. DEA allows the identification of the most efficient operation, which in turn enables providers to set the best operational strategy to follow. The results demonstrate the importance of quantitative measures in a dynamic business environment like IT outsourcing. To develop the authors' research, design science research was applied, and eighteen IT outsourcing contracts were used to demonstrate their model's utility. This work is a major contribution for measuring efficiency in IT outsourcing operations.

ENHANCING QUALITY OF IT SERVICES DELIVERY USING ENTERPRISE CROWDSOURCING

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (03) ◽  
pp. 1340001 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAJA VUKOVIC ◽  
ARJUN NATARAJAN
Keyword(s):  
Call Center ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Services Quality ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
It Services ◽  
It Infrastructure ◽  
Services Delivery ◽  
E Mail

IT outsourcing companies have adopted global delivery model, where IT services, such as backup management, are supplied out of multiple locations worldwide, based on the skill and cost of IT delivery staff, such as system administrators (SAs) and call center agents. Managing IT services quality requires insights obtained by extracting large volumes of tacit knowledge about processes, products and people, which is in collective possession of experts. Current practices to discovering this distributed and unstructured knowledge are semi-automated. Often they involve manual data collection using spreadsheets and tracking of exerts through e-mail. As such they fail to scale and provide accurate insights on demand, such as IT infrastructure snapshots. We present an enterprise crowdsourcing service that enables harnessing of human knowledge to derive quality insights in IT services. Our approach automates knowledge and knowledge owner discovery, and is based on the concept of distributed questionnaires. Experts can breakdown the knowledge requests into multiple parts and engage their networks to co-create the content. We discuss the effectiveness of our approach for knowledge discovery in the context of large-scale, on-going business activities in IT outsourcing organization, which collectively engaged over 2500 experts globally.

Sourcing Practices

2006 ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
Petter Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
Regression Model ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
It Services ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Price Performance ◽  
It Support

The rapidly increasing use of outsourcing for IT services, both in the public and private sectors, has attracted much interest from researchers and practitioners alike. While early studies of IT outsourcing were largely qualitative in nature, more recent studies have attempted to analyze the outcomes achieved in quantitative terms. Domberger et al. (2000) are consistent with the latter, but goes further by modeling the price, performance, and contract characteristics that are relevant to IT outsourcing. A two-equation recursive regression model was used to analyze 48 contracts for IT support and maintenance.

The Information Technology Outsourcing Risk: A Transaction Cost and Agency Theory-Based Perspective

2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bouchaib Bahli ◽  
Suzanne Rivard
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Agency Theory ◽  
Transaction Cost ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
Assessment Framework ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
It Operations

Many firms have adopted outsourcing in recent years as a means of governing their information technology (IT) operations. While outsourcing is associated with significant benefits, it can also be a risky endeavour. This paper proposes a scenario-based conceptualization of the IT outsourcing risk, wherein risk is defined as a quadruplet comprising a scenario, the likelihood of that scenario, its consequences and the risk mitigation mechanisms that can attenuate or help avoid the occurrence of a scenario. This definition draws on and extends a risk assessment framework that is widely used in engineering. The proposed conceptualization of risk is then applied to the specific context of IT outsourcing using previous research on IT outsourcing as well as transaction cost and agency theory as a point of departure.

The ‘Voice’ Approach of Trade Associations: Support for SMEs Accessing a Research Institute

10.1068/c16m ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiro Izushi
Keyword(s):  
Textile Industry ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Public Research ◽  
Trade Associations ◽  
Research Institutes ◽  
Information Gap ◽  
Use Of Services ◽  
External Sources ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Research Institute

Access to external sources of technical knowledge is one of the keys to staying innovative for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The literature suggests that SMEs with a weak internal R&D capacity do not make much use of institutional sources like research institutes and universities. In this paper I investigate how trade associations can induce member SMEs to use a research institute. The case of a public research institute and SMEs in the textile industry in Kyoto, Japan is examined. Evidence from the case suggests that trade associations facilitate the use of the institute by expressing a collective ‘voice’ to the management of the institute. The effect is evident among active members in the use of services involving a large information gap as to their benefits. I also consider a shortcoming of the collective approach and suggest some measures to be taken on the part of research institutes.

scholarly journals Towards the Control and Prevention of Waste in IT Service Operation Using Fuzzy Logic: Focus in Incident Management Process

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Wadie Berrahal ◽  
Rabia Marghoubi ◽  
Zineb El Akkaoui
Keyword(s):  
Fuzzy Logic ◽  
Service Management ◽  
Incident Management ◽  
Management Process ◽  
It Service Management ◽  
It Services ◽  
Technology Infrastructure ◽  
It Service ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
It Operations

All production lines are continuously confronted with the phenomenon of waste, especially in IT operations. A waste is assessed in terms of the required resources and the cost employed to solve the problem behind it. Eliminating the waste in daily operations is essential to improve IT service management. This article aims to provide an estimation of the level of potential waste, where waste generation trends are provoked by the activities of IT service management processes. We are going to focus particularly on the possibility of applying a Lean improvement process to IT services processes when using fuzzy logic method. We specifically demonstrate our contribution through the application of fuzzy analysis to the incident management process. This approach also aims at developing a theoretical and pragmatic model and promoting the knowledge of IT experts. In order to make our framework as generic as possible, concepts of IT operations, including the incident management, are inspired by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the most prominent framework for IT service governance according to the current literature.

Critical Success Factors

2010 ◽  
pp. 54-74
Author(s):  
Hans Solli-Sæther ◽  
Petter Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
Critical Success Factors ◽  
Success Factors ◽  
Research Question ◽  
It Outsourcing ◽  
Electronic Business ◽  
It Services ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Business To Business

We have identified a total of eleven theories that help explain why IT outsourcing is occurring worldwide. These theories were presented in the previous Chapter 2. Based on these theories, we develop eleven critical success factors in IT outsourcing, one for each theory. These factors are presented in the first section of this chapter. We developed the following research question: How do practitioners rank critical success factors based on outsourcing theories? To study this research question, we developed a survey instrument and conducted a survey among business organizations. Results from this survey and discussion of the findings are presented. In the second section of this chapter, we conceptualize the outsourcing of IT services as an electronic business activity, where the vendor electronically provides IT services to the client. The idea is that the purchasing of IT services is a business-to-business (B2B) relationship, which leads to outsourcing implications in terms of services that the vendor has to provide to its customers. Thus, we will in the second section look at critical success factors in electronic business infrastructure as an example of issues that need to be addressed.

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