Onshore: What about Rural Outsourcing?

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.