Offshoring: Trends, Issues, and Management
IT Management
Chairs
Rajiv Kishore
State University of New York at Buffalo
+1 (716) 645-3507
Kallol K. Bagchi
University of Texas
at El Paso
+1 (915) 747 5376
Jing Long Zhang
Huazhong University of Science & Technology, China
SIG URL
SIG IS Outsourcing: http://disc.brunel.ac.uk/CSIS/sig.html
SIG IS/IT Issues in Asia Pacific: http://disc.brunel.ac.uk/CSIS/sig.html
Description:
Offshore IT and business process outsourcing to the Asia Pacific region has evolved in recent years into a phenomenon that seems to be unstoppable. This phenomenon has become quite pervasive and almost all large-sized companies in the US and other countries now routinely offshore some of their IT activities and business processes to offshore locations in the Asia Pacific, most notably to India but also to China, Philippines, and Singapore among other locations. The labor cost arbitrage and the availability of highly-trained workers in many of the offshore locations in Asia Pacific has further fueled the offshoring phenomenon. However, the debate over the global outsourcing has become quite heated. On the one hand, press reports mention that by the year 2015, $151.2 billion in wages will have been shifted from the United States to lower-wage countries. On the other hand, other reports mention that outsourcing and offshoring reduces labor costs and, as a result, the savings allowed U.S. companies to create an additional 90,000 jobs in 2003.
Offshoring is generally taken to mean offshore outsourcing. However, offshoring includes both the outsourcing of work pertaining to IT and IT-enabled services to offshore locations as well as the distribution of such work by client firms to their own captive centers at offshore locations. This mini-track is interested in both types of offshoring. While some of the issues in offshore outsourcing remain the same as in conventional outsourcing, many new issues arise in offshoring in general due to the globally-distributed nature of the work to countries that are not only culturally very different and diverse but also have different native languages, different educational systems, different legal and regulatory systems, and different social values and economic systems. The 24-hour work cycle that comes into play due to time zone differences between the US and provider countries in the Asia Pacific introduces several new issues as well.
Researchers have noted the importance of vendor management and system integration, among other factors, in offshoring. The issue of trust between client(s) and vendor(s) also appears to be a major consideration. Theoretical frameworks are needed to better understand the offshoring process. Additionally, offshoring impacts a client nation’s employment behavior as a result of the reduction of IT jobs, elimination of certain positions, and a restructuring of the management-employee relationship. Consequently, issues of incorporating offshoring technical and management skills in IS curriculums must be addressed, as IS experts and researchers have already called for.
The mini-track will focus on (but not limited to):
- Offshoring and outsourcing: similarities and differences
- Strategic, economic, transformational, geopolitical, organizational, and infrastructural, drivers/inhibitors of the offshoring phenomenon
- Motives behind offshoring beyond the known cost arbitrage and skill availability factors
- Factors influencing/inhibiting offshoring at the firm and national level
- Legal, cultural, and other challenges of offshoring
- The evolution of the offshoring phenomenon
- Current business models and patterns of offshoring
- Offshoring choices: outsourcing, insourcing, and co-sourcing
- Organizational forms and alliance issues in offshoring
- Enabling technologies, processes, and structures for offshoring
- Innovating and transforming work processes through offshoring
- Strategic offshoring
- Identifying and selecting IT and work processes for offshoring
- Assessing costs, benefits, and risks of the offshoring venture
- Managing knowledge creation and integration in offshoring
- Offshoring knowledge-intensive business processes
- Communication issues in virtual and multi-cultural teams
- Knowledge transfer issues in virtual and globally-distributed teams
- Evaluating and selecting vendors and partners for offshoring
- Managing the contract and service level agreements in offshoring
- Governance structures for coordination and control in offshoring
- Evaluation metrics and measurement methodologies in offshoring
- Managing vendor relationships in offshoring
- Managing uncertainty and mitigating risks in offshoring
- Strategies for and antecedents of offshoring success
- Social and economic impacts of offshoring within the firm and on local communities from where work is offshored
- Social and economic impacts of offshoring in countries where outsourced work is performed
- Impact of offshoring on long-term firm and national innovativeness and competitiveness
- Nature of work and career options in the new reality of offshoring
- Educational and curriculum implications of offshoring
- The Impact of offshoring: job market, economy and employee wages
- Offshoring and the issue of trust
- Offshoring and vendor management
- Offshoring and systems integration
- Offshoring and IS curriculum
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AMCIS 2007 Colorado http://www.biz.colostate.edu/amcis07/ Key Dates:
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