ریسک های برون سپاری خارجی IT : دیدگاه ارائه دهنده خدمات

Offshore outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) services is the prevalent practice in global businesses today. Despite the strategic advantages and cost benefits that offshore outsourcing offers, outsourcing relationships also involve risks, for both the client, as well as the service provider – a fact that is evidenced by the reported failures of such engagements. Some of the prior researches in this area have focused on identifying various types of client risks and their sources. However, the study of risks from a service provider’s perspective has not received due treatment in literature. This study analyses offshore IT outsourcing risks from the perspective of service providers. A case based approach using the principles of grounded theory was used for studying the risks. Theoretical sampling was used to collect data from 5 mid-tier offshore third party service providers based in Bangalore, India. From our coding and analysis three broad categories of service provider risks emerged, namely, macroeconomic, relationship specific and project specific. Relationship maturity, nature of contract, nature of service or project and nature of client were identified as contextual factors which influence the degree of risk.

Offshore outsourcing, popularly known as offshoring, is an important global strategy for most organizations today. Offshoring business functions outside the boundaries of the firm were originally envisaged as a cost based strategy. The economies of scale and scope coupled with labor arbitrage provided a convincing business case, especially for US organizations, to shift business processes to offshore destinations like India ( Ghemawat, 2007 and Carmel and Agarwal, 2002). Offshore outsourcing is today growing and maturing from cost strategy perspectives to more value based partnerships. Partnership based contracts that have a network governance structure (Williamson, 1985) focus on the benefits of technology catalysis ( Lee and Kim, 1999 and Lee et al., 2003), which in turn strengthens resources and allows for flexibility in technology service. The client side issues in outsourcing have been well researched. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) (Coase, 1937 and Williamson, 1985) provides a basic framework for understanding the client side rationale in outsourcing and also the behavioral dimensions of service providers that determine the transaction cost to clients. In addition, a wide array of theories from various perspectives, such as economic (economic efficiency and agency cost theories), strategic (resource-dependency, core competency and coordination theories) and social (political, social contract and exchange theories) have been applied to understand client side issues in outsourcing (Lee et al., 2003). These theories help in building a business case for outsourcing, predominantly from a client perspective. However, efforts in theory building that support service providers in the offshore outsourcing context have been scanty. Since the industry is still nascent and has been growing at a CAGR of 30% during 2001–2006 (NASSCOM, 2006), it is important to develop a clear conceptual understanding of service provider issues for sustaining its successful growth.

This research attempted to identify the risks faced by service providers in IT outsourcing. There are three categories of risks that are faced by the offshore service providers, namely: (i) Project specific risks, (ii) Relationship specific risks, and (iii) Macroeconomic risks. There is close link between project specific and relationship specific risks – a bad relationship between the client and service provider will affect the project at hand; similarly, bad execution of a project could lead to a poor relationship and hence hamper additional assignments from the same client. However, there is no such connection between macroeconomic risks and the other two risk categories. The study also revealed that the level of project specific and relationship specific risks for any particular service provider depends on contextual factors like the nature of the client, service, contract, and relationship maturity with the concerned client. The interviews conducted during data collection also threw light on risk mitigation strategies that are adopted by service providers. Further study in this area can focus on understanding the exact relationship between these variables and develop models for service provider risks. These models may be mapped to various risk mitigation strategies.