A unified framework for outsourcing governance

Abstract

Outsourcing has become a trend for a business to pursue short-term operational efficiency and long-term strategic competency by delegating IT infrastructure, applications, and even business processes to external service providers. At the same time, new challenges are emerging along with outsourcing such as what are the right services that should be outsourced, how well these services get performed, what benefits outsourcing brings in, and so on. Thus, effective service governance and management mechanisms for both service outsourcers and service providers are essential to the success of outsourcing. However, current academic and industrial achievements cannot directly meet the requirements of governance in outsourcing. In this paper, a unified outsourcing governance framework not only for clients but also for providers is proposed, which provides a three-layer, three-perspective integrated governance model on three key dimensions of governance process, organizational structure, and measurement system. A typical call center outsourcing governance case study is illustrated to validate the framework. The future work and conclusion are discussed finally. © 2007 IEEE.