Develop IT Outsourcing Contract Based on QFD

Abstract

Many companies expand a great amount of effort to increase the performance of information technology (IT) outsourcing. Yet, in IT outsourcing, contracts is critical to the outcome and developing a good outsourcing contract is problematic. Unfortunately, the area of exploitation and operation outsourcing contract is still rather immature. Many firms fall into the black hole of contracts. This paper provides insight in techniques for developing IT outsourcing contracts. The goal of drafting an outsourcing contract is to combine the revenue of IT service provider with the company's profit and establish a win-win relationship. In this article we describe and discuss quality function deployment (QFD) as a framework for managing IT outsourcing requirements. In the manufacturing sector, QFD has been successfully applied to determine customers' needs for the design at its early stages of development. In order to overcome the difficulties arising from contract oriented specification and service-oriented customer satisfaction, the outsourcing contractor would find the QFD methodology useful. The research looks into the merits of the QFD system and the problems in the application of QFD in IT outsourcing contracts. The results suggest that using QFD is better focus on customers' outsourcing requirements and contributes to the outsourcing performance. Some factors would influence the quality of IT outsourcing contracts based on QFD, including adequate describing requirements, handing relations between requirements and the technology.