A Framework to Enable Offshore Outsourcing

Abstract

Offshore outsourcing (offshoring is increasingly important in IT projects. The anticipated gains are primarily cost savings and span to - amongst others - shorter-time-to-market, address scarce qualified labor force, bypass local regulations, laws, and taxes, and work following the sun. However, many offshoring IT projects fail [3] and significantly miss their anticipated improvements mainly due to cost and quality issues.. We identified categories of projects that are likely to perform well in an offshoring scenario and some that won't. They are related to specific business processes, differences in language (client vs. offshore partners), and tacit knowledge. The paper at hand specifically regards the latter category of projects and suggests an offshoring framework to enable distributed, blended workforce in a real-world business context. The framework has been developed in large scale projects with IT service firms and consultancies and has been evaluated in a large distributed project.