The global opportunity in online outsourcing

Communications of the Association for Information Systems

2004

2005

apid advances in computing and information technology (IT) are having profound effects on how economic activity is organized globally. Because of the widespread use of the internet, for many production activities, it is now possible for employers, workers, and customers or clients to be located almost anywhere in the world. Initially, this connectivity led to the growth of business process outsourcing, through which entire business activities, such as billing or customer service, can be shifted to another country. In recent years, the availability of remote or virtual work-whereby certain digital tasks or assignments are carried out for firms by individuals across the globe who are operating essentially as independent contractors-has risen rapidly, the only job requirements being access to a computer, a good internet connection, and the requisite skills. Such work, also known as online outsourcing, encompasses both virtual freelancing, which consists of skilled tasks such as website development and graphic design, and micro-work, a wide variety of less-skilled, repetitive tasks that can be accomplished online.

2004

The recent overseas outsourcing of a number of business services, such as call centres and accounts processing, has raised concerns about the future of an area of business activity in which the UK has been deemed to hold a competitive advantage. While the future direction of UK manufacturing may have been questionable, the abundance of skilled service workers has long been thought to provide the basis for a strong alternative range of businesses. But ICT developments have reduced the dependence of many tasks from any particular location and made possible the relocation of many service jobs from industrialized to developing countries that provide a suitable infrastructure, high skills labour market and labour cost benefits. The great majority of work which is being offshored is in information technology (IT) and business process or call centre work (BPO). The providers of IT/BPO services include UK specialists, multinationals, and an emerging group of Indian companies. Interestingly,...

Information Technology for Development, 2005

Information Technology for Development is the management of information technology infrastructures to stimulate economic development. The growth of the Internet has opened up new opportunities for companies in the developed world to work with developing countries. Among the most significant of these opportunities is the use of offshore outsourcing strategies that enable access to skill and expertise located in very different parts of the world. This has meant that world economies are becoming increasingly interdependent. To reflect this trend, the field of Information Technology for Development has moved beyond the issues faced by developing countries alone and has become a global phenomenon.

Information Systems Outsourcing, 2009

2004

Industrial Management and Data Systems, 2006

Purpose The present paper has as its aim to deepen in the study of Information Systems Offshore Outsourcing, proposing three essential steps to make this decision: weighing up the advantages and risks of Offshore Outsourcing; analysing the taxonomy of this phenomenon; and determining its current geography.

2008

In a world that is flat, where all clients and providers can easily transact with one another, offshoring represents the proposition that information technology providers from lowwage nations can now underbid providers from high-wage nations and win contracts. We examined a particularly flat "world"-an online programming marketplace-and found that this profound tilt to low-wage nations is overstated. We analyzed the entire history of transactions at one of the major online programming marketplaces, a marketplace for outsourcing small IT projects. The data spanned 38 months and 1 This paper was recommended for acceptance by Associate Guest Editor Kate Kaiser.