Hybrid Offshoring

Inspired by round-the-clock manufacturing, the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory endeavors to transform the production of software and other intangibles into a process of continuous development. While the concept of offshore software development is well established, few enterprises are currently able to develop the same code artifacts around the clock. We discuss the benefits of applying the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory to software development. We also present a representative scenario highlighting the problems of asynchronous communication in current offshore software development practices. Further, we introduce the notion of composite persona as a potential collaboration model within the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory and explain its ability to mitigate problems arising from communicating across cultures, languages, and time zones. Finally, we present a suite of new collaboration tools and techniques that are being developed specifically for use by composite personae in the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory.

Offshoring Entertainment and Media to India

This chapter explores opportunities for the offshoring of assorted processes in the global entertainment and media industry. Currently, this industry is experiencing incredible growth, much of it spurred by the increased digitalization of media production around the world. The rise of digital technology, faster global connectivity, an increased quality of downloads have been the driving factors behind this growth. The filmed entertainment, recorded music, and television networks and distribution sectors of the industry will undergo major technological changes in the coming years. These changes will provide opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter the global media industry. Using venture funding, startups are utilizing offshoring concepts to create a more efficient cost-effective means of doing business. The Asia Pacific market is currently the fastest-growing region, with India leading the way with offshoring of film functions. The industry will see a change from large media conglomerates as the sole owners of all media to smaller companies offering services, in which they specialize, to these larger companies, as digital media makes it easily accessible around the globe.

Outsourcing in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is being impacted by advances in information technology in four major ways: first, a broad spectrum of tasks that were previously done manually can now be performed by computers; second, some tasks can be outsourced to other countries using inexpensive communications technology; third, longitudinal and societal healthcare data can now be analyzed in acceptable periods of time; and fourth, the best medical expertise can sometimes be made available without the need to transport the patient to the doctor or vice versa. The healthcare industry will increasingly use a portfolio approach comprised of three closely-coordinated components seamlessly interwoven together: healthcare tasks performed by humans on-site; healthcare tasks performed by humans off-site, including tasks performed in other countries; and healthcare tasks performed by computers without direct human involvement. Finally, this chapter deals with intellectual property and legal aspects related to the three-pronged healthcare services paradigm.

Innovative Technological Paradigms for Corporate Offshoring

Internet technology has impelled us to develop faith in the modern practices of business, commerce, and trade. Offshoring has been viewed as a global phenomenon on the economic frontier. While new technologies need to be framed, stopgap arrangements in the form of transient solutions to upgrade the current systems are also desired. Newer regulations and multi-jurisdictional compliance have profound impacts on the growth of outsourcing projects. The development of new technological solutions must challenge the myth that legislation and statutory practices are the only possible mechanisms to counter the unscrupulous activities in the context of outsourcing. A change in the outlook toward such methodologies is essential to shed away the technological inertia and latency. This chapter opens up discussion issues in the perspective of hardware and software requirements for efficient offshoring. The aim is to achieve higher precision, protection, and throughput by applying core-computing techniques to the existing practices of outsourcing.

A Paradigmatic and Methodological Review of Research in Outsourcing

Due to the growing academic and practitioner interest in the field of outsourcing, there is a need to do a comprehensive assessment and synthesis of research activities to date. This chapter addresses this need and examines the academic literature on information systems outsourcing and business process outsourcing using a paradigmatic and methodological lens. The objective of this chapter is fourfold. Firstly, it examines the status of outsourcing research from 1995 to 2005 in eight leading academic journals, to compare the current research trends with past research directions in terms of methodologies applied. Secondly, it analyzes the research paradigms adopted in these research papers using the Operations Research Paradigm framework. Thirdly, it compares and contrasts the outsourcing research work published in three leading European journals with the work published in three leading American journals. Finally, it uncovers the implications of this study and the directions for future research.

Evolving Relationship Between Law, Offshoring of Professional Services, Intellectual Property, and International Organizations

This chapter covers four issues. First, it examines evolving international conventions to determine whether countries, especially developed countries, can take any steps to inhibit offshoring with the objective of protecting jobs in their respective countries. Second, it looks at statistics from independent sources to see if outsourcing exceeds insourcing, or vice versa, in the case of the U.S. Third, it looks at trends in outsourcing in the legal arena. Fourth, it looks at the intellectual property aspects of outsourcing and presents a long-term vision on how this ticklish issue is likely to be addressed in the long-term.

Offshoring

The changing economic and labor conditions have motivated firms to outsource professional services activities to skilled personnel in less expensive labor markets. This offshoring phenomenon is studied from a political, economic, technological and strategic perspective. Next, an analytical model is developed for achieving strategic advantage from offshoring based on global partnerships. The model studies the impact of offshoring with respect to the complexity and strategic nature of the tasks and presents a decision strategy for obtaining value through offshoring of increasingly complex tasks. The result is an integrated “24-Hour Knowledge Factory” that is based on a sustainable global model rather than a short term fiscal model. This 24-hour paradigm embodies the shift-style workforce that evolved for the manufacturing sector during the Industrial Revolution and relies on a set of critical success factors in the current environment. A case example is provided from IBM to illustrate these underlying critical success factors.

Outsourcing and Multi-Party Business Collaborations Modeling

To remain competitive, enterprises have to integrate their business processes with their customers, suppliers, and business partners. Increasing collaboration includes not only a global multi-national enterprise, but also an organization with its relationship to and business processes with its business partners. Standards and technologies permit business partners to exchange information, collaborate, and carry out business transactions in a pervasive Web environment. There is however still very limited research activity on modeling multi-party business collaboration underlying semantics. In this chapter, we demonstrate that an in-house business process has been gradually outsourced to third parties and analyze how task delegations cause commitments between multiple business parties. Finally, we provide process semantics for modeling multi-party collaborations.

The Role of Information Resource Management in Enabling the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The term 24-Hour Knowledge Factory connotes a globally distributed work environment in which teammates work on a project around the clock. The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory is a special case of a globally distributed team in which the different teams work on a sequential basis that has been clearly defined in advance. Whereas a manufactured item was the end product in the case of the factory which emerged as a consequence of the industrial revolution, knowledge-based services and knowledge-based products are the end deliverables in the case of the current information revolution; hence, the term 24-Hour Knowledge Factory. Work can be decomposed by task style or by organizational style, and allows for greater specialization of workers. A case study from IBM details surprising differences between colocated and distributed teams, and leads to a future state analysis for organizations seeking to study or implement the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory.

The Role of Prisons in Offshoring

Outsourcing and offshoring are popular (and often controversial) trends in American business, yet not all outsourcing is done in foreign countries; many jobs are being sent to prisons, where inmates can provide low-cost, locally based labor. This trend has extended from a role in manufacturing to whitecollar jobs, like telemarketing. This chapter analyzes this type of outsourcing in terms of the costs and benefits for business and consumers, as well as the social implications.