The Need to Outsource as though it were Insourced

Abstract: 

The presentation will summarize three recent studies on IT outsourcing in online markets and the banking industry, and show that the driving force in those cases is an apparent conscience attempt by clients to force a high trust culture relationship on the vendors in a low trust culture marketplace in what seems to be an attempt to mitigate agency risks. Ideas presented by Fukuyama on high and low trust cultures will be discussed. Two of the studies deal with Rent A Coder (now part of eLance), published in MISQ 2008 and EJIS 2014. The third is about the IT outsourcing contracting practices of a large European bank, published in MISQ 2008. The audience will be encouraged to wonder how this might apply to recent IT outsourcing debacles.

David Gefen is a Professor of MIS at Drexel University, Philadelphia, US, where he teaches IT Outsourcing, Strategic Management of IT, Database Analysis and Design, VB.NET, and data-mining. He received his Ph.D. in CIS from Georgia State University and M.Sc. in MIS from Tel-Aviv University. His research focuses on trust and culture as they apply to the psychological and rational processes involved in ERP, CMC, and e-commerce implementation management, and to outsourcing. David’s wide interests in IT adoption stem from his twelve years of experience in developing and managing large information systems. His research findings have been published in MISQ, ISR, IEEE TEM, JMIS, JSIS, Omega, JAIS, CACM, CAIS, and elsewhere. David is an author of a textbook on VB.NET programming and a book on the art of IS outsourcing. David is on the Editorial Boards of MISQ and JMIS.