A Unified Framework for Outsourcing Governance

Abstract

Outsourcing has become a trend for a business to pursue short-term operational efficiency and long-term strategic competency by delegating IT infrastructure, applications, and even business processes to external service providers. At the same time, new challenges are emerging along with outsourcing such as what are the right services that should be outsourced, how well these services get performed, what benefits outsourcing brings in, and so on. Thus, effective service governance and management mechanisms for both service outsourcers and service providers are essential to the success of outsourcing. However, current academic and industrial achievements cannot directly meet the requirements of governance in outsourcing. In this paper, a unified outsourcing governance framework not only for clients but also for providers is proposed, which provides a three-layer, three-perspective integrated governance model on three key dimensions of governance process, organizational structure, and measurement system. A typical call center outsourcing governance case study is illustrated to validate the framework. The future work and conclusion are discussed finally.

Outsourcing of IT and Absorptive Capacity: A Multiple Case Study in the Brazilian Insurance Sector

“…The offering and acquisition of commoditized activities is the first phase of the process of implementing a successful outsourcing arrangement (Fan, Xiao, Shun, & Ji, 2007). Many researchers have suggested that organizations use their service providers as sources of external knowledge that positively influences their AC, and consequently the generation of innovations (Bahli, Wettenberg, Borgman, & Heier, 2013;Gonçalves, 2016;Lacity, 2017;Liang, Wang, Xue, & Cui, 2016;Weeks & Feeny, 2008).…”

IT controls in the public cloud: Success factors for allocation of roles and responsibilities

“…Moreover, the RACI charts has been employed in outsourcing (Ramakrishnan & Pro, 2008;Simonova & Zavadilova, 2011) and managing governance in outsourcing (Meng, He, Yang, & Ji, 2007) too. While these governance frameworks use RACI to assign various roles and responsibilities in completing tasks or deliverables, in COBIT, its implementation is too generic for practical use (Zhang & Le, 2013).…”

“…Since governance brings in responsibilities, allocation of responsibilities in the form of RACI charts has also been used for managing governance in outsourcing (Meng et al, 2007;Ramakrishnan & Pro, 2008;Simonova & Zavadilova, 2011). The RACI matrix used in outsourcing captures cross-vendor dependencies, and defines roles and responsibilities for all vendors (Ramakrishnan & Pro, 2008).…”