Outsourcing Risk Management and Success Factors in Palestinian ICT Companies
Date
2016-11-21
Authors
Shaheen, Wejdan Ziad
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
An-Najah National University
Abstract
Nowadays, outsourcing as a contractual relationship where an external provider takes responsibilities to perform one or more of a client firm's business processes instead of performing them in-house, is becoming a common and an attractive practice in global business and has obtained enormous attention in ICT sector. Although firms reap various benefits and strategic advantages from outsourcing, they face many outsourcing related risks. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify outsourcing risks and conduct outsourcing risk management, it could increase outsourcing success than ever. The motivation for this research was to develop a framework for outsourcing risk management in the West Bank's ICT sector from the provider's point of view. This framework aims to enhance the firms' ability to manage and mitigate outsourcing related risks, that increase the success of their outsourcing activities, maintain the relationship between the firms and their clients, and thus allow Palestine to be one of the best destinations for providing outsourcing business. The finding showed that the main risk factors affect outsourcing process are financial instability and Israeli occupation and socio-political instability, the main factor for the success of outsourcing is hiring outsourcing experts, and the main mitigation action for outsourcing risks is distribution of responsibilities clearly. With regards to assess the extent of applying risk management through outsourcing life cycle in the West Bank's ICT sector, is considered good. Moreover, the findings of hypotheses testing showed that there is a statistically significant relationship between outsourcing risk management practices and the success of building strategic outsourcing relationship. Finally, the researcher developed the proposed framework to be adopted in Palestinian ICT providers as an effective management tool.