نظارت بر کیفیت فرایند در برون سپاری خارجی : مدل و یافته ها از بررسی چند کشور

We investigate how recent advances in information technology and telecommunications have led to real-time monitoring of processes at the site of the provider by a buyer located across the globe. We construct a game-theoretic model of the dynamics of the buyer–supplier interaction in the presence of moral hazard and incomplete contracting. We derive the Minimum Quality Threshold (MQT) below which the provider's output will certainly be inspected. Our findings show that the buyer can pick a level of monitoring and thereby force the provider to exceed the quality level of the MQT in output quality and avoid costly and wasteful inspection. Finally, our model explains why the production of processes that are complex and more prone to errors are actually monitored less by the buyers. We furnish the results of a comprehensive, multi-year, multi-country survey of the efficacy of monitoring in off-shore outsourcing projects and demonstrate strong empirical support for the findings of the model.

Advances made in information technology and telecommunications in the recent years have enabled firms to create real-time linkages between their information systems and share large data sets at relatively low costs. This trend has given rise to the phenomenon of firms outsourcing their entire back-offices to off-shore (and onshore)1 third party service providers who execute these processes for them. Consulting firm Gartner estimates that cross-border Business Process Outsourcing (or BPO for short) will grow into a US$ 178.5 billion business by 2005 from US$ 123.6 billion in 2001 (Gartner, 2002). Other estimates suggest that the off-shore BPO industry will grow to over US$ 230 billion in 2015 (Forrester, 2001). The practice has gained considerable attention from the business media and from policy makers. Several legislations have been proposed to curtail the extent of outsourcing of processes to overseas labor markets. While lot of the media attention has centred on outsourcing of call centres, outsourcing now spans knowledge-intensive functions. An associated issue is the requirement for effective monitoring of the outsourced functions, to prevent post-contractual opportunistic behavior. While the moral hazard problem in a principal-agent setting has been addressed extensively in the extant literature, this has largely dealt with managerial monitoring of employers in the same firm. In cross border BPO contracts, however, the monitoring problem is inter-firm, and the recent technological advances that have enabled the monitoring of supplier's agents in real-time by the buyer are a relatively new phenomenon. Unlike in the production of physical goods, the production of purely information goods involves just the flow of digitized information. Recent advances in technology and workflow software have made it possible to calibrate the digital flow of information (and therefore workflow) in order to achieve real-time monitoring. For example, Telecorp Products, Inc.'s CentrEE Solution Suite's Quality Monitoring Module allows for managers to observe and asses the quality of agents’ interaction with customers, while Voice Print International Inc.'s Activ! IQ software (and several other similar products like HandMetric Inc.'s CCPM or Data Collection Resources Inc.'s CEMS) monitors a call center's performance and quality metrics. In addition to these, our survey revealed a wide variety of custom developed monitoring systems that were deployed by firms such as OfficeTiger, Wipro Technologies, HCL Ltd. (India), Beredium International (Mauritius), IT-One (Thailand). These systems are inter-organizational information systems that allow a client (buyer of services) to monitor the quality of the off-shore provider's finished processes. Thus, the confluence of traditional human intervention with the new real-time software monitoring mechanisms has made it possible to outsource even highly knowledge-intensive functions such as radiology, equity research, cash flow forecasting, third-party logistics and coordination, bioinformatics and tax accounting.

In this paper, we built a theoretical model to explain the findings of our field research consisting of several surveys of off-shore outsourcing practices. These surveys looked at various issues like cost structures, operational and strategic risks and technology-enabled emerging governance forms. The surveys further indicated the rise of a new hybrid governance mechanism, the extended organizational form, which combines the best features of the market (i.e., cost efficiency) and the firm (managerial control). Thanks to advances in information and communication technologies, buyer firms can exert managerial control (not just monitoring but actual control) over outsourced processes even as they take advantage of wage arbitrage. We are currently working on investigating how this hybrid organizational structure – wherein the agents (managers) of the client manage the employees of the providers – will impact the scope, efficiency and the pricing of off-shore outsourcing initiatives. Our surveys have also indicated several other issues of interest; we would like to investigate the relative benefits of alternate governance mechanisms like JVs, BOTs26 and Captive Centers. Another interesting issue that has emerged is how the boundaries of the firm are being changed by the emergence of new technologies that allow multiple firms to be linked through the same set of processes. We are investigating how an information architecture that can span multiple firms can be forged and what its impact will be on the nature and future of work in the modern corporation.