Study on Critical Success Factors for IT Outsourcing Lifecycle

Abstract

Nowadays IT outsourcing has changed and become more complex. The management of IT outsourcing continues to challenge organizations today. Each IT outsourcing has its own lifecycle, and can be regarded as an IT project. In this work, IT outsourcing process is divided into four development stages: preparation, selection, negotiation, and implementation, which ranging from decision to continuous management and performance evaluation. We take a qualitative research approach, grounded theory, to analyze the main characteristics for different IT outsourcing development stages. Especially, we concentrate on the implementation stage, and discuss four critical success factors influencing on both client side and vendor side, including inter-organizational relationship, organizational IT capability, knowledge transferring and sharing, and dual-role skilled people.