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Contribution to Book
Onshore: What about Rural Outsourcing?
The New IT Outsourcing Landscape: From Innovation to Cloud Services (2012)
  • Mary Lacity
  • Joseph Rottman
  • Shaji Khan
Abstract
Recently, academic outsourcing research has focused on offshore outsourcing of IT work. Offshore outsourcing almost always promises to reduce client costs, but also promises faster delivery speed, the ability to focus in-house IT staff on higher-value work, access to superior supplier resources and capabilities, and process improvement. Research has found that offshore outsourcing can delivery on many of its promises (Lacity and Rottman, 2008), but researchers have also found that offshore outsourcing poses additional challenges when compared to domestic outsourcing. For example, offshore outsourcing is more challenging because of time zone differences (Carmel, 2006), increased efforts in knowledge coordination (Kotlarsky et al., 2008; Kanawattanachai and Yoo, 2007) and boundary spanning (Levina and Vaast, 2008; Mahnke et al., 2008), the need for more controls (Choudhury and Sabherwal, 2003; Lacity and Rottman, 2008), cultural differences (Carmel and Agarwal, 2001; Carmel and Tjia, 2005; Krishna et al., 2004), defining requirements more rigorously (Gopal et al., 2002), and difficulties in managing dispersed teams (O’Leary and Cummings, 2007; Oshri et al., 2007). Some of these issues are so difficult to manage that practitioners are turning to nearshore alternatives (Carmel and Abbott, 2007). Another emerging trend is rural outsourcing.
Publication Date
January 1, 2012
Editor
Leslie P. Willcocks and Mary C. Lacity
Publisher
Springer
DOI
10.1057/9781137012296_7
Citation Information
Mary Lacity, Joseph Rottman and Shaji Khan. "Onshore: What about Rural Outsourcing?" BerlinThe New IT Outsourcing Landscape: From Innovation to Cloud Services (2012) p. 222 - 250
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/shaji-khan/13/