برون سپاری سیستم های اطلاعاتی:نسخه برداری از یک چارچوب های موجود در زمینه های فرهنگی مختلف

In order for any field of study to refine the promising concepts and weed out the weaker concepts it is necessary that researchers revisit earlier studies from time to time and evaluate their general applicability to new contexts. Replication is an important technique for researchers to embrace in order to achieve this goal. In this study, we test one of the frameworks of technology outsourcing developed in the West, by changing the cultural context. Following Kodak's historic outsourcing decision, technology outsourcing has assumed significant importance among researchers and practitioners. Most of the research in relation to technology outsourcing has been conducted in the Western culture (including the USA and the UK), so our goal in this study is to extend the understanding of technology outsourcing research conducted in the West to another culture-that of Korea, through replication.

The goal of scientific research is to study phenomena and deduce objective findings about the phenomena that might be applicable to other situations. The word research itself implies that one goes back and looks for observations, facts and compares the current findings with previous ones. The development of a body of literature, in any scientific field of study, warrants this effort on the part of the researchers to revisit previously proposed theories and to study the effect of several variables such as time and context on the original findings. Such gaps exist in many fields of scientific inquiry, including operations management, because scholars have focused more on the development of new theories than the extension and generalization of existing work. In other words, theory building has received more attention than theory testing; the “search” is taking precedence over “research” (Berthon et al., 2002). Hence, revisiting theories to make them more generalizable is an important issue that needs attention.

The contributions of this study are at least three-fold. First, our replication study succeeded not only in supporting the findings of the target study, but also in reporting presence of conflicting evidence that questions the applicability of some target study findings regarding outsourcing in a different cultural context. It also reports some new variables that affect outsourcing success. Hence, our study could be categorized as a replication study that extends the theoretical framework, according to the classification schemes of replication studies as proposed by Tsang and Kwan (1999) and Berthon et al. (2002). Given the gaining importance of replication studies in operations management literature, this study provides an example for researchers in order to spur the conduct of more replication studies, with the resulting enrichment of literature. Thus, the focal study contributes to the literature on generalization of outsourcing knowledge, by confirming old values (of variables) and finding new values, thus, disconfirming the old values of the variable that are already known to influence outsourcing decisions making and success. With respect to the duration of contract and scope of competition, the focal study found partial similarity with the target study's values on these variables. With respect to the variables contractual completeness, design of contract to include partnership measures, criticality of tasks outsourced, familiarity with the outsourced task, postponing a few outsourcing decisions, and withholding a piece of contract as bait, the values found in the focal study differed from those of the target study. In addition to these similarities and dissimilarities, we found two new variables “Trust” and “Task Partitioning to gain Advantage of Varied Expertise.” The focal study offers additional insights regarding a managerial objective variable that relies more on relationship building and less on flexibility and control. In other words, the focal study extends the understanding of IS outsourcing not only by confirming and disconfirming the findings reported in the decision making framework offered in the target study, but also by adding new variables such as “trust,” “task partitioning to gain advantage of varied expertise,” and “reliability and relationship” to that framework.