Offshoring Information Technology: Sourcing and Outsourcing to a Global Workforce

by Paul Tjia and Erran Carmel

Book Overview

The decision to source software development to an overseas firm (offshoring) is looked at frequently in simple economic terms - it's cheaper, and skilled labor is easier to find. In practice, however,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521843553
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.5" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Great book!

Best off shore book out there... great info...lays it out pretty straight. Easy to understand and follow.

An excellent introductory volume and roadmap

This volume is well-written, lucid and easy to follow. The authors have done an excellent job in providing an explanatory framework for offshoring, as well as giving a realistic look at potential costs and benefits. Their list of suggestions and guidelines is comprehensive. The book avoids the trap of becoming overly technical and steers clear of being specific to any particular country or industry. I was pleasantly surprised to find chapters on such important topics as country-specific legal pitfalls, privacy rights issues, and how to sell the idea of offshoring inside a company resistant to the idea. The authors livened up their material with numerous case studies to illustrate key points. The level of detail they provided on how to write a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) was also impressive. Overall this was an excellent volume, and the only two objections that I have are both minor. First, the book could benefit from a small amount of updating; some of the data, especially in Part I of book, dates from 2001-2003. In any other discipline, that would still be considered fairly recent. However in technology, that verges on being stale. In addition, that was the period of the global downturn in IT. The authors' data would be obviously impacted by that global economic event. To be clear: I do not believe that any of the authors' points would be reversed by updating the data. On the contrary, I expect that current data would only strengthen their points, as the trends they identified have only accelerated since the book's first publication. Second, as noted earlier the authors provided several cases of companies who tried offshoring and either failed, or suffered setbacks. Given the fact that offshoring is not the cure-all for every company, it would have also been useful to see a couple of case studies of companies who investigated the offshoring option but decided against it. It is just as important to understand why a company declines to offshore, as it is to understand why they would undertake to do so. This is a book that I wish I had read before working on several offshoring/outsourcing projects for former employers. It is highly recommended for anyone who is contemplating the offshore option, or who has recently been put in charge of making such an option successful.

Useful reference for IT Professionals

"All things being equal, any manager would prefer to manage a co-located team rather than a distributed team," how true. Authors Erran Carmel and Paul Tija believe that IT managers need to feel as comfortable with managing distributed teams as they are with co-located teams. They intend their book, Offshoring Information Technology, to act as a primer for IT professionals, students and teachers in business and technology programs as well as policy makers and analysts in and around governments. That is a lot of end parties to satisfy, so does this book hit the mark. Erran Carmel had previously authored, "Global Software Development Teams", in 1999, and has deeply focused on the topic of developing software with global teams for years. It is obvious that a researcher was one of the co-authors, as very accurate listing of references are made, more than you usually see in many of these books on offshoring. These references provide another list of papers and publications that the reader can use for further research. The book makes excellent use of cross-referencing between topics, which also adds to its usage as a good reference tool. Right off I like the preface in which the authors define the terms offshoring and outsourcing. Since I agree there are many strange definitions leading everyone to think outsourcing means offshoring, this needed to be included. The offshore stage model, previously defined by one of the authors in a research paper, puts the offshoring numbers in to perspective by dividing it in to stages and the number of Fortune 1000 companies currently using the offshoring model. These numbers may be surprising to some, as the actual usage is much smaller than is played up in the media. The book is full of case studies, most of them fairly interesting. The case study in chapter 9 is meant to show the difference between working in a low-content country versus a high-context country like India. I, along with I believe many practitioners, will look on this case study and say that Christina (not her real name) was not a good manager, no matter where she was working, if they thought dumping a bunch of new work on a team was not going to impact the schedule. Low-content or high-content country aside, the project manager made too many assumptions and may not be the experienced project manager that she thought she was. I think others will see the same when they read it. Another real life case study gives an example of one company trying to do a comparison between countries; what do we learn from it, price wins out over quality in the end, which in reality is often the case. The emphasis on knowledge transfer is exceptional. This area is often glossed over in many offshoring books. Chapter 7 which is dedicated to managing the offshore transition defines different ways of undertaking knowledge transfer. One of the ways that they describe is to have the developers work in different positions, i.e. put them in to the user's position, so they

Valuable Strategic Perspective

This book does an excellent job of linking offshoring to a company's business strategy. Many companies are pursuing offshoring to take advantage of lower wages in other countries. Chapter 5 shows how cost reduction can be strategic, and the other potential non-cost-based advantages of offshoring. Its treatment is also balanced, showing the downsides, costs, and risks of offshoring as well as the benefits. And it talks about choices companies have in implementing an offshore strategy. I am Executive Director of a research center on process management, and we have done research in this area. I know and respect Erran Carmel, the author, and Peter Schumacher, who co-authored Chapter 5. Peter's work is grounded in consulting that he has done at the Value Leadership Group, which advises companies on how to think beyond cost cutting and view offshore as an opportunity to build unique competitive advantage.

Very useful and practical reference book on offshore outsourcing

A very useful and practical reference book on offshore outsourcing, the first of its kind that brings together a lot of information in one handy reference. Covers a lot of ground with sufficiently deep overviews of the different issues related to offshore outsourcing. The book in my opinion would be very useful for the buyer of IT offshore outsourcing services with separate sections that address very relevant issues related to offshore outsourcing such as strategy, change management, vendor selection and legal/contractual issues. The sections on the softer issues such as culture and communication provide valuable insights into some of the typical problems that arise with offshore outsourcing. A separate section of the book provides some useful tips for the provider of offshore services especially in the area of business development. Each chapter ends with a summary of the key points which I found very useful to incorportate in my powerpoint presentations! The book could also be an excellent text for a business management course on IT offshore outsourcing. Very good value for money! Sandy David has more than 10 years of professional experience in offshore outsourcing and currently works for Ordina, one of the leading IT Outsourcing companies in the Netherlands. He has a first degree in Electronics Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration. email: sandy.david@ordina.nl