| Information technology outsourcing – the practice of transferring IT assets, leases, staff, and management responsibility for delivery of services from internal IT functions to third party vendors – has become an undeniable trend. In recent years, private and public sector organizations worldwide have outsourced significant portions of their IT functions to service providers onshore and offshore (e.g., Lewin & Peeters, 2006; Solli-Sæther & Gottschalk, 2007). Examples can be found in major organizations such as Scandinavian Airlines Systems, ABB, and Rolls-Royce. In a business perspective, outsourcing is motivated by the promise of strategic, financial, and technological benefits. The success of outsourcing, then, should be assessed in terms of attainment of these benefits (Lee, Miranda, & Kim, 2004). In a user perspective, outsourcing success is the level of quality of offered services.
This book is about managing IT outsourcing performance, focusing on relationship management, value creation and measurements. In addition to organizational and management issues, a number of other important topics and areas are covered in this book to shed light and generate new insights into the way forward for IT outsourcing. For example, value configurations may differ between outsourcing parties, creating challenges in connecting primary and secondary activities of client and vendor organizations This book offers a comprehensive literature review of IT outsourcing based research. It provides methods, tools, and metrics for relationship management and for value creation and performance measurement. In order to understand the inherent complexities and the underlying constructs of relationship and performance management, three internationally based outsourcing relationships are presented. |
