The Evolution of Offshore Outsourcing in India (original) (raw)
Related papers
The sustainability of India's comparative advantage in it offshore outsourcing
European Conference on Information Systems, 2006
In an increasingly competitive business environment characterized by more globalization, deregulation and technological advances, companies have been looking for ways of differentiating their products and services and also rethinking their business model through leaner operations and reduced costs. In this context, a new practice that has recently gained a lot of attention is the offshore outsourcing of information technology (IT) activities and services. It has become an increasingly attractive proposition to co mpanies and organizations in industrialized countries. The most often cited benefit of such a practice is its cost-effectiveness; i.e., the ability of having business tasks or processes performed in an offshore country (most often in India) at an equal quality but significantly reduced cost than doing them at home. This paper presents the benefits and concerns in IT offshore outsourcing and discusses the sustainability of the comparative advantage that India has as the leading offshoring destination in the world. It argues that the currently low wages of skilled IT staff in India may be eroding over time and companies will be shifting their attention to other value-adding benefits as opposed to looking in offshoring countries for just lower cost provision of IT tasks and services.
Global Offshore Outsourcing and the Indian IT/BPO Sector: Theoretical Perspectives
2015
The main arguments in this chapter are as follows. For effectively managing human capital (HC) in the Indian IT/BPO sector, which typifies a business-to-business relational approach, one needs to accommodate both inward-looking and outward-looking approaches. Although transaction cost economics (TCE) can provide a good explanation for the initial motivation for organisations to offshore services to India, other aspects in an outsourcing relationship render the inclusion of additional theoretical lenses. This is coupled with high expectations of outsourcing firms when they offshore to the Indian BPO industry. However, it is not sufficient to explain why offshoring arrangements are sustained over the long term, as evidence here is scant. Similarly, while resource-based views (RBVs) and HC and operations management (OM) theories offer additional internal insights about the sources of, and strategies associated with, sustained performance levels required for IT/BPO business relationship...
Evaluating Offshore IT Outsourcing in India: Supplier and Customer Scenarios
2003
This paper presents the findings from an ongoing research study on offshore IT outsourcing. Field work was carried out in India and in the UK to evaluate the scale and scope of outsourcing activities. CEOs and CIOs were interviewed in fifteen supplier firms in India and two customer firms in UK, about strategic positioning in the offshore outsourcing market; benefits and risks from outsourcing; and other demand and supply-side issues. The findings suggest that, though offshore outsourcing offers new business opportunities for IT suppliers, much of the outsourced work continues to be low risk and low value. The challenge for outsourcing suppliers is therefore to devise strategies to move from body-shopping work to low cost, high value contracts, without incurring additional risk.
Evaluating offshore IT outsourcing in India: supplier and customer
2003
This paper presents the findings from an ongoing research study on offshore IT outsourcing. Field work was carried out in India and in the UK to evaluate the scale and scope of outsourcing activities. CEOs and CIOs were interviewed in fifteen supplier firms in India and two customer firms in UK, about strategic positioning in the offshore outsourcing market; benefits and risks from outsourcing; and other demand and supply-side issues. The findings suggest that, though offshore outsourcing offers new business opportunities for IT suppliers, much of the outsourced work continues to be low risk and low value. The challenge for outsourcing suppliers is therefore to devise strategies to move from body-shopping work to low cost, high value contracts, without incurring additional risk.
Developing a Model for Offshore Outsourcing
2003
This paper reports on empirical research on the strategic positioning of the offshore outsourcing industry with respect to the management of IT services. It attempts to analyse and identify eight essential factors of the present offshore outsourcing model and they are-Contract, Infrastructure, Quality, IPR/confidentiality, Culture, Trade policy, Project management, and Expertise. Using a case study method, each factor has been selected in order to propose enhancements to the model by developing a matrix that elaborates the criteria for selecting an offshore outsourcing vendor.
Critical Issues of IT Outsourcing Vendors in India
Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2011
Global outsourcing of IT and IT-enabled services (ITES) has now become an accepted corporate strategy of a vast majority of firms around the world. The functions being offshored have increased in scope and magnitude and have climbed the value chain ladder. However, the literature has overwhelmingly focused on client-centric issues to the neglect of vendor concerns. There is a rich tradition of ranking critical issues confronting Information Systems executives, and some studies have even explored critical issues of outsourcing clients. These rankings have significant implications for both researchers and practitioners. Our study focuses on the nascent area of IT outsourcing vendors. We examine the issues from the standpoint of IT outsourcing vendors in India, currently the primary destination for IT offshoring. The results suggest that for the Indian vendors, the most critical issues are not related to cultural, language, and time-zone differences as suggested in many writings. Rather, the most critical concerns are issues dealing with work arrangements and relationships with the client, and issues related to the client's organizational readiness for offshoring. Clearly the understanding of such issues is important to the vendors, but also to the clients in order to maintain an effective dyadic relationship.
2004
The recent overseas outsourcing of a number of business services, such as call centres and accounts processing, has raised concerns about the future of an area of business activity in which the UK has been deemed to hold a competitive advantage. While the future direction of UK manufacturing may have been questionable, the abundance of skilled service workers has long been thought to provide the basis for a strong alternative range of businesses. But ICT developments have reduced the dependence of many tasks from any particular location and made possible the relocation of many service jobs from industrialized to developing countries that provide a suitable infrastructure, high skills labour market and labour cost benefits. The great majority of work which is being offshored is in information technology (IT) and business process or call centre work (BPO). The providers of IT/BPO services include UK specialists, multinationals, and an emerging group of Indian companies. Interestingly,...
2015
Outsourcing became a relatively well-known term in the last three decades both in the academic and the business world. Contrarily or because of it there are so many different terms around the outsourcing model that many times it could confuse even the experts of the area. The aim of this research to collect all important outsourcing terms, organize them, create a framework or grouping them with different viewpoints. The framework could help to understand the similarities and differences about the different classes.