Making the Sourcing Decision of Software Maintenance and Information Technology

Abstract

Outsourcing has been getting a significant growth for the last few years. Organizations tend to outsource Information Technology (IT), primarily to take advantage of the availability of qualified, trained and skilled workforce in low cost countries across the globe. Outsourcing of IT and software maintenance seem very promising, but a number of factors, risks, and challenges associated with the outsourcing process that make the sourcing decision very complicated. The present study aimed at gaining in-depth understanding of the three aspects of outsourcing, namely; perceived benefits of IT outsourcing, influencing factors of IT outsourcing and software maintenance offshoring. The findings of the current study will lead us to develop a sourcing framework for outsourcing decision as well as a decision support system for software maintenance. A systematic literature review is performed that presents perceived benefits of IT outsourcing, the influencing factors of IT outsourcing and software maintenance. Furthermore, the identified factors are analyzed based on their occurrences in literature as well as chi square test is performed to derive the significant differences amongst the factors based on decades. Similarly, critical success factors are derived both for IT outsourcing and software maintenance offshoring. Our article shows that how the critical success factors impact the IT as well the software maintenance in global delivery perspective. The findings of the current study will help the IT experts and decision makers in making suitable sourcing decisions.