برون سپاری خارجی : پویایی، از منظر نحوه ی عمل

Based on a case study of the Danish company SimCorp and the development of its operations in Kiev, Ukraine, we analyze offshore outsourcing in a broader, longitudinal foreign operation mode context, and how it may contribute to mode change in the host country over a certain span of time. SimCorp had outsourced part of its software development work to two Ukrainian companies. The case study approach allowed us to explore the dynamic processes in depth. The study shows that involvement in the foreign market generates learning in various forms that provide a foundation for eventual mode development or change—beyond outsourcing specific learning. At the same time, restrictions on 3rd parties’, that is, independent vendors’ access to confidential client data, as well as protection of specific investments in human assets, may eventually become a driver for mode change, as in the SimCorp case, to ensure more effective control of the foreign operation. Finally, the case study shows how outsourcing can be used proactively as a springboard to deeper and changed operation mode activities in a foreign market.

Offshore outsourcing—the delegation of specified value chain activities to one or more foreign provider(s)—has, for good reasons, received considerable attention from international business and management researchers over the last decade. This has been reflected in recent special issues on offshore outsourcing (as well as captive offshoring) in International Business Review (2011), Journal of International Business Studies (2009), Journal of International Management (2007) and Journal of Management Studies (2005). Outsourcing was the focus of a recent special issue of Industrial Marketing Management in which its impact on business-to-business marketing was examined. In the introduction to the special issue Ahearne and Kothandaraman (2009, 376) maintain: ‘Increasing globalization has made companies focus more on their outsourcing decisions. Moving beyond the tactical companies has begun to incorporate outsourcing as a strategic weapon in their armory’. Recently, attention has been drawn to the growing importance of offshore outsourcing in the services sector ( Bunyaratavej et al., 2008 and Griffith et al., 2009). Given the size of the services sector in advanced economies, this latter trend is of particular significance (UNCTAD, 2004). The ability to utilize offshore outsourcing has been facilitated by the development of large multinational companies providing outsourced production and other services on a global scale (Welch, Benito, & Petersen, 2007). Intermediaries like the Hong Kong-based company Li and Fung have emerged as specialists in handling the various steps in offshore outsourcing for their client firms—allowing companies effectively to outsource the outsourcing problem ( Economist, 2001, June 2, Einhorn, 2009, May 25 and Welch et al., 2007). In this article we focus on services and take the treatment of outsourcing, in offshore form, down a different strategic path by asking the questions: what follows, and what should follow, after offshore outsourcing?

The SimCorp case demonstrates that offshore outsourcing may involve much more than the outsourcing act itself. This ‘more’ can be quite substantial, depending on how much the outsourcer becomes involved in the foreign market and with its foreign partner. This is perhaps even more the case with services outsourcing, where there is often considerable focus on training and interaction of staff on both sides to ensure the quality of what is ultimately supplied—with cost implications. Whether it is a starting intention or not, involvement in the foreign market inexorably generates learning in various forms which may build a foundation for eventual mode development or change. Such mode-related learning goes beyond the outsourcing-focused organizational learning noted in other studies (Manning et al., 2008). At the same time the inevitable concern about retention of key personnel at the outsourcing partners (representing significant, sunk investments in training and education), problems of contractual restrictions on the use of 3rd party development resources for client support, aligned with the outsourcer's internal learning processes, eventually became a driver for mode change at SimCorp to ensure more effective control of the foreign operation. However, while we have emphasized learning and control, this does not mean that other dynamic mechanisms are less influential or less interactive—it is the way in which they evolved and influenced responses in each other that in a combined form explain mode change. The factors that emerged in this study may be situation and company specific, but we suspect that they are suggestive of the types of mode change factors that might be found in other studies of international outsourcing in an operation mode development context.