CMIT ITB - Information Technology and Business Process Offshoring*

Faculty
Prof. Volker Mahnke and Prof. Suprateek Sarker

Course Coordinator
Prof. Suprateek Sarker

Prerequisite/progression of the course

Both professors have published extensively on the topic. However, the course will be taught in English.

Course content, structure and teaching

Today, we operate in a globally networked world, where work is conducted in a distributed environment, mediated by various ICTs, and organizations often rely on workforce, inside and outside their boundaries, to get work done. Such work can vary from routine clerical or operational work (e.g., operating call centers for recording orders, and staffing a helpdesk) to complex knowledge work (e.g., developing information systems, preparing tax or legal documents, and reading X-rays and scans).

The participants of the course will see the advantages of this mode of organizational functioning, and will also appreciate the complications and pitfalls, based on a variety of readings describing/analysing actual situations in organizations. In the end, the goal of the course is to prepare the students who are informed about the various tradeoffs and challenges (e.g., economic, psycho-social, legal, ethical, and political) involved in making decisions in and managing such environments, especially IT-offshoring, and IT-enabled Business Process Offshoring.

The teaching structure is envisioned as follows: After an introduction to the (1) empirical reality of IT offshoring and business processes offshoring, the course progresses (2) to theoretical foundations of outsourcing and offshoring research, including transaction cost economics, the resource based view, and the relational view. Lecture (3) introduces students to the complications of collaborating across time and space. Lecture (4) discusses the different types of offshoring, and the advantages and pitfalls. Lecture (5) focuses on IS vendor and country selection issues and frameworks. Lecture (6) focuses on assessing what to offshore and what not to offshore, and how to prepare an organization for offshoring. Lecture (7) concentrate on continuous management of relational success. Lecture (8) deals with issues pertaining to agility and work-life balance associated with distributed work and offshoring. Lecture (9) concentrates on the analysis and remedies to failure sources in offshoring relationships. Lecture (10) discusses ethical dilemmas of offshoring, summarizes the course, and provides guidance for the examination.

The teaching takes place as a combination of teacher and student presentations, class discussions, role plays, and planned hands-on activities such as interviewing vendors and their clients in class. A central feature of the teaching is that the students are required to continuously interact with our case companies, CapGemini, Accenture, CSC, Tata, as well as their clients to collect real-life data on the working of IS outsourcing contracts and management. Students will have to present continuously a critical evaluation of papers as part of their reflection of knowledge development and as part of the preparation of their final report.

The course's development of personal competences

Students learn professional terminology, key problems/solutions, and tactics in the outsourcing and offshoring management arena, and learn to communicate professionally on these concepts.

Learning Objectives

After the course students should be able to describe, classify, structure, critically evaluate, and combine the concepts, theories, methods, and models discussed in the relevant literature.

Specifically, they should be able to:

Define outsourcing, insourcing, distributed work, and various types of offshoring, such as offshore insourcing, offshore outsourcing, nearshoring, etc.
Describe the advantages and complications of distributed work
Describe the advantages and pitfalls of different types of offshoring
Describe how organizations need to prepare themselves for offshoring different types of work
Identify the key players (e.g., countries, vendors) who offer offshoring services, and list some of their strengths and weaknesses.
List the key decision variables regarding whether or not to offshore, what to offshore, and where (i.e., the location)
Describe various challenges in managing offshoring, including relationship with vendors, remaining agile, and dealing with work life balance challenges.
Develop a questionnaire and systematically gather data from Danish companies engaged in IS or business process offshoring.
Analyze concrete problems in offshoring by applying and creatively modifying the concepts, theories, methods, and models of the course, and to report, evaluate, and disseminate solutions to practical problems related to IS and business process offshoring.

Type of examination, exam aids and assessment

Individual project exam/home assignment.

Recommended literature

Argyers & Meyer (2007) Contract design as a firm capability: An Integration of Learning and Transaction Cost Perspectives. Academy of Management Review, 42 (4): 1060-1077.
Combs, J.G. and D.J. Ketchen. (1999).Strategic Management Journal, 20(9), 867-888.
Das, T.K. and B. Teng, (2002). Alliance constellations: A social exchange perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27(3), 445-456.
Dibbern, J., Winkler, J. A. Heinzl (2008) Explaining Variations in Client Extra Costs Between Software Projects Offshored to India. MISQ, 32, 4333-367.
Dyer, J.H., and K. Nobeoka. (2000). Creating and Managing a High Performance Knowledge Sharing Network: The Toyota Case. Strategic Management Journal, 21, 345-368.
Gao. G. et al. (2008) “It Takes 10 Years to Sharpen a Sword: a Study on the China ITS offshoring industry,” MIS Quarterly Executive
Gopal A., T. Mukhopadhyay, and M. Krishnan (2002), The Role of Software Processes and Communication in Offshore Software Development, Communications of the ACM, 45(4) pp. 193-200.
Hoffmann, W. (2007). Strategies for managing a portfolio of alliances. Strategic Management Journal, 28(8), 827-856.
Kaiser, K., Hawk, S. (2004), "Evolution of offshore software development: from outsourcing to cosourcing", MIS Quarterly Executive, Vol. 3 No.2, pp.69-81.
Kedia, B.L. and Lahiri, S. (2007) International Outsourcing of Services: A Partnership Model, Journal of International Management, 13:22-37.
Levina, N. and Ross, J. W. (2003) From the vendor’s Perspective: Exploring the Value Proposition in IT Outsourcing, MIS Quarterly, 27(3), pp. 331-364.
Lewin, A. Y., and Peeters, C. (2006). Offshoring Work: Business Hype or the Onset of Fundamental Transformation, Long Range Planning (39), pp. 221-239.
Luo, Y. (2007) An integrated anti-opportunism system in international exchange. Journal of International Business Studies, 1–23.
Luo, Y. (2009) Procedural fairness and interfirm cooperation. Strategic Management Journal, in print.
Mahnke, V (2007) Offshore middlemen: Offshore intermediation in offshore system development. Journal of Information Technology (with J. Wareham, N.B. Andersen)
Mahnke, V. (2006) Outsourcing innovative capabilities for IT-enabled services. Industry and Innovation: 189-207. (with Overby, M.; S. Oscan)
Mahnke, V. (2008) Coping with failure sources in R&D consortia: The case of mobile service development. International Journal of Technology Management
Mahnke, V. (2007) Communication Metaphors-in-Use: Technical Communication and Offshore Systems Development, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 50(2), pp 93-108. (with Wareham, J., S. Peters, N. Andersen)
Mohr, J. and R. Spekman. (1994). Characteristics of partnership success: Partnership attributes, communication behavior, and conflict resolution techniques. Strategic Management Journal,15(2), 135-152.
Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J. and L.P. Willcocks (forthcoming 2009) “The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring”, Macmillan, London
Reuer, J.J. and R. Ragozzino. (2006). Strategic Management Journal, 27(1), 27-43.
Rottman, J., and Lacity, M. (2004) Twenty Practices for Offshore Sourcing, MIS Quarterly Executive, 3(3) pp. 117-130.
Santos, F.M. and K. M. Eisenhardt. (2008). Organizing boundaries and constructing markets. Academy of Management Journal, in press.
Sobol, M. G., and Apte, U. M. (1995). Domestic and Global Outsourcing Practices of America’s Most Effective IS Users, Journal of Information Technology (10), pp. 269-280.
Sarker, S., Sarker, S., and D. Jana (2010) "The Impact of the Nature of Globally Distributed Work Arrangement on Work-Life Conflict and Valence: The Indian GSD Professionals' Perspective," European Journal of Information Systems.
Sarker, S., and S. Sarker “Exploring Agility in Distributed Information Systems Development (ISD) Teams: An Interpretive Study in an Offshoring Context,” Information Systems Research, forthcoming 2009.
Sarker, S., and S. Sahay (2004) “Implications of Space and Time for Distributed Work: An Interpretive Study of US-Norwegian Systems Development Teams,” European Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2004, pp. 3-20.