Traditional Outsourcing Research Articles

The problem with annotation. Human labour and outsourcing between France and Madagascar

Artificial intelligence advancements have reignited job displacement debates that focus on how the use of artificial intelligence affects labour, without considering how the production of this technology influences labour division. The generalisation of machine learning has created an increased demand for outsourced data workers. Outsourcing companies and crowdwork platforms are both used to generate, annotate, and enrich data. This data tasks are performed by workers from low-income countries, who often earn poverty wages. As with traditional outsourcing, workers must integrate complex multinational subcontracting networks. In this article, we examine how France outsources artificial intelligence-related tasks to workers in the African island nation of Madagascar. For our study, we interviewed 26 data workers, eight employees of French start-ups, and conducted secondary research on two artificial intelligence systems – a canteen checkout terminal and an algorithm to detect shoplifters in stores. The data collected allowed us to reconstruct an end-to-end artificial intelligence production value chain, revealing the need for data classification and artificial intelligence problematisation. Commercial artificial intelligence, therefore, does not displace employment by automating service jobs. Rather, by delocalising labour into the Global South, it lengthens the externalisation chain.

“Smart” outsourcing in support of the humanization of entrepreneurship in the artificial intelligence economy

The article focuses on the problem of optimizing human resource management with systematic coverage of economic efficiency and corporate social responsibility. The purpose of the article is to study the role of outsourcing in the humanization of entrepreneurship in the AI economy. The potential of outsourcing in the field of entrepreneurship development in the AI economy is justified through econometric modeling using the regression analysis method on the example of companies from the “Global-500” in 2022. Promising directions for the development of “smart” outsourcing in support of the humanization of entrepreneurship in the economy using the method of comparative analysis are determined through the identification of its advantages in comparison with traditional outsourcing for the humanization of entrepreneurship. Using the case study method, successful examples of the use of “smart” outsourcing in various business operations of entrepreneurship are systematized. The key conclusion is that in the AI economy, the humanization of entrepreneurship can be provided with the help of “smart” outsourcing, which is more preferable than traditional outsourcing due to its increased flexibility, rationality, and efficiency. The theoretical significance lies in clarifying the specifics of outsourcing in the AI economy, as well as in justifying the preference for “smart” outsourcing and in providing a scientific methodology for its implementation. The practical significance is connected with the fact that the proposed practical recommendations on the implementation of “smart” outsourcing allow to improve the efficiency of entrepreneurial activity and strengthen the resilience of businesses to economic crises, supporting economic growth through “smart” outsourcing.

Supply chain strategy of adopting blockchain in post-sale customer care outsourcing in a competitive environment

Post-sale customer care (PSCC) outsourcing is an effective supply chain strategy to reduce costs, but traditional outsourcing methods cannot ensure consumers’ belief in PSCC quality, harming the firms’ competitive strategy. To ensure consumer satisfaction through transparency, this article examines evolving supply chain strategies of leveraging blockchain to outsource PSCC operations of competing manufacturers to third-party agents. Based on consumers’ beliefs and blockchain adoption cost, manufacturers have two choices; to outsource the PSCC operations with or without blockchain, resulting in multiple outsourcing strategies. Results show that the consumers’ belief in one manufacturer’s outsourcing strategy has detrimental effects on the stance of another manufacturer. Moreover, the blockchain cost and consumers’ beliefs dictate the manufacturers’ strategies for PSCC outsourcing, resulting in a ‘quadruple zone of strategic fit’, where both manufacturers adopt blockchain or neither adopt blockchain, or one adopts while the other does not. Interestingly, despite the low or zero blockchain cost, both manufacturers will outsource without blockchain if their traditional business models satisfy consumers. The extended analysis reveals contradictory results that manufacturers should outsource more often with blockchain to facilitate consumers when a long-term warranty is offered, or the product has a higher failure rate, even though, overall these factors increase costs.

Analysis of the Development of IT Outsourcing Companies in The Era of Cloud Computing--Take Infosys as an Example

With the development of information technology and mobile Internet, especially with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud computing, which emphasizes distributed patterns rather than the centralized pattern is gradually known and applied. More and more enterprises have to adopt remote work, which greatly promotes the process of enterprise digital transformation, the digitization is greatly changing the world. The emergence of cloud computing is a huge change in traditional enterprises’ concept and thinking of IT resources. The characteristics of flexibility, innovation, diversity and scale of cloud computing stimulate the innovation vitality of enterprises and promote the development of enterprises. At the same time, the enterprises in the process of digital transformation are faced with various difficulties, therefore, how to choose high quality and efficient enterprise digital transformation method has become an important task for the current enterprise development. This paper takes India’s digital service provider Infosys as an example and analyzes the future development direction of traditional IT outsourcing companies in the current digital environment.

A potential game-based outsourcing computation framework for multiple calculators

Outsourcing computation enables a computationally weak client to outsource the computation of a function f to a more powerful but untrusted server. The traditional outsourcing computation model forbids communication between players, but it has little effect. Based on the game theory, this paper establishes an outsourcing computation model which is more in line with the actual scene. Firstly, we construct a structural mapping relationship between security outsourcing computation and the optimization problem. Secondly, by designing the individual potential function and the global potential function, the individual goal is consistent with the global goal to ensure the correctness of the calculation results. Finally, in the information exchange environment between calculators, we construct a Zero-determinant strategy to ensure that the calculator chooses the strategy according to the predetermined target.

Challenges and practices identification in complex outsourcing relationships: A systematic literature review.

Complex IT outsourcing relationships aptitude several benefits such as increased cost likelihood and lowered costs, higher scalability and flexibility upon demand. However, by virtue of its complexity, the complex outsourcing typically necessitates the interactions among various stakeholders from diverse regions and cultures, making it significantly more challenging to manage than traditional outsourcing. Furthermore, when compared to other types of outsourcing, complex outsourcing is extremely difficult because it necessitates a variety of control and coordination mechanisms for project management, which proportionally increases the risk of project failure. In order to overcome the failure of projects in complex outsourcing relationships, there is a need of robust systematic research to identify the key challenges and practices in this area. Therefore, this research implements systematic literature review as a research method and works as a pioneer attempt to accomplish the aforementioned objectives. Upon furnishing the SLR results, the authors identified 11 major challenges with 67 practices in hand from a total of 85 papers. Based on these findings, the authors intend to construct a comprehensive framework in the future by incorporating robust methodologies such as AHP and fuzzy logic, among others.

Relativism in the Cloud: Cloud Sourcing in virtue of IS Development Outsourcing - A literature review

Nowadays Cloud Computing and Cloud Sourcing is on the agenda in many organizations. Many Chief Information Officers (CIOs) that urge for alternatives to traditional outsourcing are interested in how they can take advantage from Cloud Computing, by sourcing Information Technology (IT) from the cloud. This paper provides an overview of the research direction of Cloud Sourcing in the IS field. A literature review based on selected papers from top Information Systems (IS) journals and conferences were conducted. Findings from the review indicate that the attention of Cloud Sourcing in IS literature has mainly been directed towards security and risk as well as adoption issues, and that Cloud Sourcing is claimed to be the next generation of outsourcing. Unfortunately, this is where this strong claim ends without any further evidence, which indicate that there is a need for more research on Cloud Sourcing, especially in the direction of investigating relationships and implications when organizations start using Cloud Sourcing.

The multisourcing model of safe supply chain management

The logistics outsourcing concept is to address the feasibility of using its own capabilities and sources of supply to perform certain logistics functions that the company can entrust to an external partner. However, in the current context of rapid change, it is important to make a quick and efficient decision on sources of supply: regardless of the sourcing model of the company. That is, what is the usual supply strategy for the company. Security (reliability and stability) of supplies is at the first place. Therefore, a quick decision on the optimal source of supply is the optimal solution. More precisely is the optimal combination of the use of internal resources of the company and the resources of external suppliers. Multisourcing is a type of outsourcing used by many companies in conditions of frequent changes. Unlike traditional outsourcing, the multisourcing model involves the use of several different vendors for the same product at different times. The decision depends on the level of security. For example, with multiple sources, a company can choose the best supplier for a particular task. By outsourcing certain operations, a company can perform critical tasks on its own. These actions can achieve optimization of operating costs. However, when deciding on multisourcing, it is important to assess the risks. It is important to estimate the cost of supply according to different options. You should compare the results of calculations and compare with the risks. These actions can ensure security of supply. So, the proposed economic and mathematical model is able to help to make the right decision of the rational choice of supply channel from several alternatives and, as a consequence, to achieve the following main goals: improving the quality of supply management; reduction of the logistics cycle; reduction of supply costs; increase the reliability of supply

A green lateral collaborative problem under different transportation strategies and profit allocation methods

Abstract Collaboration between companies in transportation problems seeks to reduce empty running of vehicles and to increase the use of vehicles’ capacity. Motivated by a case study in the food supply chain, this paper examines a lateral collaboration between a leading retailer (LR), a third party logistics provider (3 PL) and different producers. Three collaborative strategies may be implemented simultaneously, namely pickup-delivery, collection and cross-docking. The collaborative pickup-delivery allows an entity to serve customers of another in the backhaul trips of the vehicles. The collaborative collection allows loads to be picked up at the producers in the backhauling routes of the LR and the 3 PL, instead of the traditional outsourcing. The collaborative cross-docking allows the producers to cross-dock their cargo at the depot of another entity, which is then consolidated and shipped with other loads, either in linehaul or backhaul routes. The collaborative problem is formulated with three different objective functions: minimizing total operational costs, minimizing total fuel consumption and minimizing operational and CO 2 emissions costs. The synergy value of collaborative solutions is assessed in terms of costs and environmental impact. Three proportional allocation methods from the literature are used to distribute the collaborative gains among the entities, and their limitations and capabilities to attend fairness criteria are analyzed. Collaboration is able to reduce the global fuel consumption in 26% and the global operational costs in 28%, independently of the objective function used to model the problem. The collaborative pickup-delivery strategy outperforms the other two in the majority of instances under different objectives and parameter settings. The collaborative collection is favoured when the ordering loads from producers increase. The collaborative cross-docking tends to be implemented when the producers are located close to the depot of the 3 PL.

Conflict management in a multinational firm's production shifting decisions

In recent years, many apparel multinational firms (MNFs) have shifted their production from traditional manufacturing bases (e.g., China) to the emerging ones located in Southeast Asia (e.g., Vietnam and Bengal). The interactions among market sizes, MNF's competition with local rival and the global tax rules play key roles in the MNF's decisions. In this paper, we study the preferences of a MNF and its contract manufacturer (CM) over two manufacturing outsourcing structures and investigate whether their objective conflicts can be reconciled. The MNF relies on the CM for production and sells goods in both Chinese and Southeast Asian markets. It is optional for the MNF to use a CM located in China, but has to suffer from the CM's differential prices because of China's partial value-added tax (VAT) refund policy. It is also optional for the MNF to use a CM located in Southeast Asia, resulting in uniform production fee for the goods sold in two markets. The former is traditional outsourcing structure (TS), and the latter is shifted outsourcing structure (SS). Interestingly, we find that, the MNF may first prefer SS, then prefer TS, and back to prefer SS, as the relative market potential between the Southeast Asian market and the Chinese market increases. The CM's preferences may switch twice, too. We identify the opportunities where the preferences of the MNF and the CM are aligned, which are driven by China's partial VAT refund policy.

Conventional versus Unconventional Outsourcing

Today’s world is becoming very competitive and companies are going the extra miles and revisiting their strategies to keep up and sustain competitive advantage. Companies are striving towards low cost, high-quality products delivering value to customers therefore a need to focus on core competencies is essential to create that value and minimize overheads. Capitalizing on know-how, brand equity management, customer and partner relationship management, today’s companies drive for building long-term strategic ventures with selected partners in key markets. Companies are realizing the importance of adding value, reducing cost while delivering products to customers smoothly and efficiently therefore gaining market penetration, market development and product development which result in more market shares at minimum cost, better global presence, brand ownership in case of distributor partnership allocation. This study focuses on the many ways of conventional and unconventional outsourcing, to gain competitive advantage while pointing out where outsourcing can be of failure to some companies lacking strategic management. It also shows the importance of intelligent versus traditional outsourcing where factors such as cutting cost, streamlining the operations and creating partnerships have to be more revolving and consider more convergent and divergent thinking adding for instance innovation to cutting cost, or streamlining the value chain as a whole or adding trust based partnership not just an arm length.

A decision model for last-mile delivery planning with crowdsourcing integration

Crowdsourced transportation has been playing a more important role when faced with the growing demand for last-mile delivery, mainly due to the booming e-commerce. Crowdsourced delivery offers greater flexibility and requires less capital investment than traditional outsourcing approaches. This study deals with the planning of the last-mile delivery with partial crowdsourcing integration, in which crowdsourcing helps to manage the delivery from a transfer point to final customer locations. The decision involves several basic questions, including which customer is to be outsourced, by which outsourcing partner, and at which transfer point. The decision problem is formulated as a mixed integer programing (MIP) model. In addition, a heuristics algorithm has been designed to handle large-scale problems. Based on the numerical experiment, the heuristics algorithm can generate a good quality solution within an acceptable computation time. In general, this study shows that well-planned crowdsourcing integration can take advantage of the flexibility and cost saving of crowdsourcing for last-mile delivery.

Project Control, Coordination, and Performance in Complex Information Systems Outsourcing

ABSTRACT Information systems outsourcing has not only become prevalent but also involves an increasingly wide range of activities beyond the traditional programming, testing, documentation, and localization activities to include complex business-focused project planning, process design, requirements determination, and logical and physical systems designs. Such complex IS outsourcing often requires interactions among various stakeholders across different locations and cultures and therefore is much more difficult to manage than the traditional IS outsourcing. Coordination and control have been viewed as especially important project management strategies for managing project activities; however, little research has focused on how they relate to each other and how they collectively affect the performance of complex IS outsourcing projects. In this study, we examine the differential performance effects of outcome and behavior controls on coordination and show that the effect of outcome control on project performance is mediated by coordination.

Compliance as a service: Utilising the power of the cloud

The importance and changing nature of financial regulation requires special attention to a variety of domains: law, financial instruments and technology. Historically, technological innovation in the financial sector has developed asymmetrically by favouring outperformance and revenue generation to the detriment of ensuring regulatory obligations were complied with in a robust, demonstrable yet cost-effective way. This paper explores advancements in compliance-related technology brought on by the increased use of cloud software, data standardisation and a new application of the software as a service (SaaS) model: compliance as a service (CaaS). It includes an analysis of how utilising the network effects provided by cloud technology improves compliance outcomes. This new model of regulatory compliance lowers the risk of errors in legal interpretation, facilitates industrywide collaboration among a community of compliance professionals and brings important insights from practice to bear on often abstract legal reasoning. The unique combination of high-touch service by compliance experts and an ability to both discuss and learn from peers avoids the pitfalls of the traditional outsourcing model and naturally creates an industry standard. In this model, participants gain knowledge while reducing costs through a high level of automation and with assurance that regulatory change is integrated at speed.

Commissioning of public services: cooperation and strategic approaches

Because of increasing complexity and pressure on services, from both financial and delivery perspectives, public administrators increasingly explore new public-private service delivery approaches. This article undertakes a review of the commissioning literature and compares the approach with traditional procurement. It is argued that commissioning goes beyond traditional procurement and outsourcing agendas by prioritizing on cooperation and strategic outcome enablement, two forces that shape both service delivery on one side and procurement on the other.

Cloud Computing Auditing

Cloud Computing is a new form of IT system and infrastructure outsourcing as an alternative to traditional IT Outsourcing (ITO). Hence, migration to cloud computing is rapidly growing among organizations. Adopting this technology brings numerous positive aspects, although imposing different risks and concerns to organization. An organization which officially deputes its cloud computing services to outside (offshore or inshore) providers and implies that it outsources its functions and process of its IT to external BPO services providers. Therefore, customers of cloud must evaluate and manage the IT infrastructure construction and the organization’s IT control environment of BPO vendors [25]. Since cloud is an internet-based technology, cloud auditing would be very critical and challengeable in such an environment. This paper focuses on practices related to auditing processes, methods, techniques, standards and frameworks in cloud computing environments.

Framework for identifying appropriate alliance governance structure for a knowledge process outsourcing organisation in an as-a-service delivery scenario

Traditional business process outsourcing (BPO) has been typically restricted to standardised process functions not perceived as core to the outsourcing organisations. However with knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), organisations are also exploring outsourcing of closer-to-core knowledge- intensive processes. Additionally, they are increasingly unwilling to the draw the line of separation between business process and relevant technology outsourcing and are expecting an integrated as-a-service approach. Thus KPO service providers are confronted with the dual challenge of building knowledge-intensive capabilities as well as integrating the relevant technologies hitherto not under their purview. This is leading many KPO organisations to look at building strategic partnerships with technology organisations. However, the success of the endeavour potentially rests on the organisation's alliance management capability as well as its ability of acquire, internalise and implement knowledge from partners (absorptive capacity). This paper attempts to develop a framework of possible alliance governance structures specifically aimed at KPO in an as‐a‐service scenario.

The Forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation in the EU: Higher Compliance Costs Might Slow Down Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’ Adoption of Infrastructure as a Service

Cloud-based services (especially IaaS) are widely used by businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises. The recently adopted General Data Protection Regulation is going to influence the EU cloud computing market significantly, and SMEs using IaaS to process personal data of their clients face a need to adapt to those changes if they are to remain compliant with the data protection rules. The objective with the paper was to look into the regulation adopted and identify the aspects that significantly influence the relations between a cloud provider and a client, especially if seen from the perspective of SMEs. Further, the paper discusses whether IaaS will be an obvious choice for SMEs seeking to hire computer infrastructure resources for the purpose of processing personal data when the compliance efforts necessary after the General Data Protection Regulation comes into force are taken into account. The findings suggest that forthcoming changes could significantly affect the industry and, in light of the likely increase in transaction costs, that SMEs may want to consider traditional outsourcing services instead. Consequently, the results of the data protection reform would be contradictory to other objectives of the European Commission, especially that of wider adoption of cloud services by SMEs.

Product Design Outsourcing in Competitive Markets

Original design manufacturers (ODM) is a new form of global outsourcing. Traditional outsourcing only transfers the production of a product from brands to manufacturers. An ODM, in contrast, not only manufactures the product for a brand, but also designs the product. Using an analytical model, we investigate strategic design outsourcing decisions of firms. Two firms competing in a horizontally differentiated market decide whether to design the products by themselves or to outsource product design to an ODM. We consider two different channel structures – one in which each firm partners with an exclusive ODM and the other in which both firms partner with a common ODM. We find that both symmetric and asymmetric outsourcing outcomes can arise in the equilibrium, even though competing firms are assumed to be completely symmetric. Surprisingly, firms’ outsourcing incentive can be inversely related to the cost of designing a product, i.e., neither firm outsources product design when the cost is high, one firm outsources product design and the other insources when the cost is in an intermediate range, and both firms outsource product design when the cost is low. We also find that firms are more likely to outsource product design when there is a common ODM in the channel than when there are exclusive ODMs.

Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure Outsourcing

Cloud Computing has caught the imagination of the CIOs across the world with rapid scalability being the most important feature of Cloud Computing, with very high degree of provisioning capability from the Cloud vendors in comparison to on premise IT infrastructure. It provides for the shift of spend from capital expenditure in IT budgets to a more flexible and manageable operating expenditure for the CIOs. However, as an emergent technology, there are initial adoption level concerns that are associated with Cloud Computing in most of the companies. Infrastructure as a Service or (IaaS) adoptions have not been high especially in the large companies which continue to opt for traditional IT Infrastructure Outsourcing. This paper compares Cloud Computing (Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS) adoption, outlined through two cases of Cloud (IaaS), with traditional IT Infrastructure Outsourcing outlined through four cases studies of traditional IT Outsourcing.