The Effect Of Offshoring On The Information Technology Sector PDF Download

Outsourcing, as a business strategy, has been adopted for a very long time now. Offshoring, a subset of outsourcing, gained prevalence during the late eighties of the last century. Over the years, IT has evolved from being a back office procedure to a decisive and strategic paradigm, the rapid development of which has impacted, on a global scale, the way businesses conduct their operations. Offshoring has played a major role in bringing about this transformation and helping establish an industry of epic proportions in terms of geographical spread, operational diversity and impact on business and social aspects the world over. While popular perception identifies offshoring as the most effective way to trim business costs. This is not true for many reasons; the primary being, one size does not fit all and the cost-saving benefits are not always realized. The first half of this thesis aims at providing a better understanding of the IT offshoring industry by looking at the different types of outsourcing and offshoring, certain new trends that are taking form and have the potential to gain prevalence in the future, perceived benefits of IT offshoring and issues that need to be considered by an IT business before it adopts offshoring as a strategy to achieve its goals. Also, in order to demonstrate the impact of offshoring, we discuss certain implications of it on the computer science community with regard to computer science education. From a client business's perspective, there seem to be no consistent offshoring models to depict the big picture of how offshoring actually takes place. We present a general offshoring model in the latter half of the thesis that incorporates two-stage cost benefit analysis to identify candidate processes for offshoring. We then move on to present an IT process-offshoring specific model that has been derived from other models adopted by a number of client businesses and service providers, albeit customized to reflect specific process-offshoring needs. We call it the staged process-offshoring model. Our model is different in the sense that it establishes a balanced view of process-offshoring events taking place at both ends of the offshoring spectrum as opposed to presenting just strategies employed by the service provider to fulfill requirements of the client. With the model being structured in layers, each layer is present on the onshore and offshore end, which contributes towards the construction of a regulated offshoring management architecture in addition to demonstrating a job creation potential not just at the service provider location but, more essentially, at the client location.