Analyzing Factors That Influence Offshore Outsourcing Decision of Application Maintenance

Abstract

Application maintenance consumes a considerable amount of an organization's time and resources each year. Almost 60% of IT budget is spent alone on application maintenance. The reason of offshore outsourcing of application maintenance is not only the reduction of maintenance cost but to free up the resources and to keep the focus on core products. Offshore outsourcing is a common business strategy that is used by companies to achieve cost savings about 20-50%. However, the decision making process of application maintenance is a complex phenomenon. It is based on a set of influencing factors, clients' requirements and nature of the project. Hence, the current study is aimed at the in-depth investigation of the complex sourcing decision process of application maintenance. Accordingly, a systematic literature review is performed to determine the influencing factors and critical success factors that will be used by the decision makers for the evaluation of projects before making the outsourcing decisions. A total of 15 influencing factors out of 52 selected papers were identified. Based on the defined criteria, amongst the identified factors, only 10 factors were ranked as critical success factors, which are employees' skills, cost, legal requirements, infrastructure, communication, knowledge transfer, maturity level, project management, language barrier and frequent requirements changes. Consequently, a sourcing model was proposed based on the identified critical success factors that help the IT managers and domain experts in making appropriate outsourcing decisions. INDEX TERMS Application maintenance, critical success factors, influencing factors, offshoring, outsourcing, outsourcing decisions.

Empirical Investigation of Influencing Factors Regarding Offshore Outsourcing Decision of Application Maintenance

“…The adoption of hybrid methodology aims to thoroughly investigate the research domain. We have already performed a systematic literature review [1] that identified a list of influencing factors concerning the offshore outsourcing decisions of application maintenance. The current study, evaluates the findings of the systematic literature review in the outsourcing industry.…”

“…Since, it follows a pre-defined research review protocol, it therefore, differs from an ordinary review [37]. A new study protocol was developed and followed for the identification of influencing factors concerning offshore outsourcing decision of application maintenance that was published in [1], [2]. The systematic literature reviews were carried out by adopting the guidelines of Kitchenham [37].…”

“…In the current study online questionnaire survey is used for data collection. The questionnaire is based on the identified factors that were reported in the previous studies [1], [2]. The questionnaire comprises of both open ended and close ended questions.…”

“…GSD provides the opportunity to reduce the cost significantly of software development by utilizing the resources of low-wage countries as well to quickly accomplish the tasks by following the sun. Similarly, this strategy benefits the organizations by accessing the cheaper resources of low cost countries, utilizing the employees with IT capabilities and high skill set, gaining global expertise and international market shares; and achieving product with high quality [1], [2], [3], [4].…”

A Review on Multicriteria Decision Support System and Industrial Internet of Things for Source Code Transformation

“…e DSS applications are evidenced in different areas of life. Such applications include the DSS in agriculture, business, energy, and so on [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Numerous domains and applications have explored methods and theories regarding decision-making for alternatives including from simple to advance, intelligent, and smart systems [16,17].…”