Making the Sourcing Decision of Software Maintenance and Information Technology

Hanif Ur Rahman,Palwasha Afsar,Mukhtaj Khan,Mushtaq Raza,Nadeem Iqbal,Habib Ullah Khan

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3051023

Hanif Ur Rahman, Palwasha Afsar + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3051023

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Journal: IEEE Access	Publication Date: Jan 1, 2021
Citations: 47	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Qatar University

Abstract

Outsourcing has been getting a significant growth for the last few years. Organizations tend to outsource Information Technology (IT), primarily to take advantage of the availability of qualified, trained and skilled workforce in low cost countries across the globe. Outsourcing of IT and software maintenance seem very promising, but a number of factors, risks, and challenges associated with the outsourcing process that make the sourcing decision very complicated. The present study aimed at gaining in-depth understanding of the three aspects of outsourcing, namely; perceived benefits of IT outsourcing, influencing factors of IT outsourcing and software maintenance offshoring. The findings of the current study will lead us to develop a sourcing framework for outsourcing decision as well as a decision support system for software maintenance. A systematic literature review is performed that presents perceived benefits of IT outsourcing, the influencing factors of IT outsourcing and software maintenance. Furthermore, the identified factors are analyzed based on their occurrences in literature as well as chi square test is performed to derive the significant differences amongst the factors based on decades. Similarly, critical success factors are derived both for IT outsourcing and software maintenance offshoring. Our article shows that how the critical success factors impact the IT as well the software maintenance in global delivery perspective. The findings of the current study will help the IT experts and decision makers in making suitable sourcing decisions.

Highlights

Nowadays, organizations tend to outsource Information Technology (IT) primarily to take advantage of the availability of qualified, trained and skilled workforce in low cost countries across the globe
The result shows that the perceived benefits of IT outsourcing in the selected papers which are more than 50%, are cost savings, focus on core activates, access to skills, improving quality, improving business processes and access to technology
WORK The current study provided a comprehensive overview of the three aspects of outsourcing namely: benefits of IT outsourcing, influencing factors of IT outsourcing and influencing

Summary

Introduction

Organizations tend to outsource Information Technology (IT) primarily to take advantage of the availability of qualified, trained and skilled workforce in low cost countries across the globe. Outsourcing is a popular strategy in the developed countries where a remarkable increase can be seen in the level of outsourcing [1], [2]. The market size of outsourcing is continuously getting expansion, according to [3] the combined IT and business process outsourcing markets were worth US $373 and $424 billion in 2011 and 2014 respectively with the 4.4% annual growth rate. Based on the criteria such as qualified work force, financial attractiveness and business environment the top six potential locations for offshore services are the Asian countries, namely China, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippine and Thailand [4], [5]. The outsourcing of services and products is one of the strategies that results into high level of competitiveness. The main categories of IT outsourcing are business process outsourcing, application development, application maintenance and infrastructure services [6]–[10]

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