Offshore outsourcing in large companies: Motivations and risks perceived

Abstract

When companies opt for information systems (IS) outsourcing, within the set of contracted services, they can contract their entire service needs to onshore suppliers or to offshore companies, or part of these services can be contracted to onshore suppliers and the other part to offshore suppliers. The offshore outsourcing reveals itself nowadays as an important strategic option to IS management optimization. This paper presents and discusses the main results of a survey that was carried out in Portugal to determine several aspects of offshore practice in large companies. It allowed the identification of the services more frequently contracted, the most common motivations for choosing offshore suppliers and the main risks perceived by companies. This research contributes to a better understanding of the IS offshore market, enabling client companies and vendors to improve their strategic business action.

An Exploratory Study on the Influencers of the Perceived Relevance of CIO's Activities

“…Managing projects (Bhatt et al, 2006;Gorgone et al, 2000) and application development faces new challenges since most of today's projects and applications are not built in-house. Inclusively, they tend to be partially or totally outsourced to countries with inferior costs like India (offshore outsourcing) (Heeks et al, 2001;Hirschheim et al, 2004;Iijima, 2007;Varajão et al, 2012a).…”