Offshoring – the new dilemma of IS research (original) (raw)
Related papers
IT OFFSHORING: History, Prospects and Challenges
Journal of the Association …, 2006
Offshore provision of IS/IT related services has been growing rapidly in recent years and seems firmly set to continue. This trend is fueled by the many advantages of offshore service procurement; however, there are dangers in this practice. Furthermore, offshoring requires adaptation of the IS function and IS management. This, in turn suggests the need for modifications of IS curricula in order to prepare graduates for the new environment. The advantages of offshoring are those of outsourcing in generalcost saving and allowing the organization to focus on its core activities. The main dangers include loss of possibly-important business skills and reliance on remote suppliers who face risks that are unfamiliar to the client firm. The loss of jobs due to offshoring also introduces political considerations. Offshore IS activities are generally the responsibility of an organization's CIO. This management responsibility requires awareness of cultural and legal differences and of risks associated with offshoring and outsourcing in general. Offshoring has an effect on job opportunities for graduates of 1 Detmar Straub was the accepting senior editor. 770 Offshoring: History, Prospects and Challenges/Davis et al. information systems programs. The number of some jobs will shrink, but new positions with new responsibilities are likely to emerge. Training of students in the U.S. and other countries in the developed world to function in an environment of offshored operations will introduce new IS roles and skills and require the adaptations of IS curricula.
International Journal of Information Technology Project Management, 2011
This article is about the role played by trust in structuring and shaping offshoring projects and how cultural differences interfere in the related inter-firms relationships. The study, conducted with three IT service provider companies established in Tunisia, has provided a dataset that confirms the structuring role of trust in terms of transferability effect between the client and the offshoring unit. Findings indicate that trust is perceived as an influencing factor when it is situated at the inter-organizational level and not at the interpersonal level for all the actors concerned. This finding is independent of the cultural affiliation (individualistic versus collectivist). While cultural differences are not "negotiated" the same way by all of the respondents, trust seems noticeably more difficult to settle between the Tunisian partners than between the Tunisian offshoring unit and its European clients.
“You Feel The Threat From Asia”. Onshore Experiences of IT Offshoring To India
Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 2015
This article investigates the experiences of employees and managers in Swedish companies that offshore IT services to India, focusing on how implementation of offshoring is changing the work organization and working conditions for software developers onsite. Our analysis highlights the fact that the working conditions have been significantly redesigned in several different ways because of offshoring, most obviously due to the need for knowledge transfer between the onshore and the offshore working sites. The study illustrates how employees and managers onsite utilized different strategies for knowledge transfer and how these strategies were more or less successful, sometimes due to resistance from employees. The article concludes that, although offshoring contributed to a separation of conception from execution in these companies, there were few signs of routinization of daily work tasks for onsite employees. Instead, it was the routinized and noncore tasks that were offshored while...
It-Offshoring – A Comparison of Expectations and Experiences
2008
The BITKOM (German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) forecasts a serious lack of IT experts on the German labour market in the upcoming years. Despite of the recession because of the financial crisis they predict around 11,000 vacancies, especially in the field of software development. One instrument to overcome the expected shortage is the deployment of experts