Challenges of A Small Enterprise in the Sourcing Life Cycle: Evidence from Offshoring to India

Abstract

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have generally shied away from offshoring, because of issues of control, trust, scarce resources to manage legal contracts and service level agreements, and other inherent risks. This paper documents two year-long experiences with offshoring website design and development by a small client company based in USA to a small vendor company in India. It is instructional to compare and contrast the offshore outsourcing experiences of large enterprises to the experience of this small enterprise. Of particular interest are differences in the formality and structure of the outsourcing process and the implications of these differences.

Keywords:

• Offshoring
• transactional website
• website architecture
• virtual relationship
• decision to outsource
• vendor selection
• time zone differences
• cultural differences
• trust

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shailendra C. Jain Palvia

Dr. Shailendra C. Jain Palvia is a Professor of MIS at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University. During 1997-2004, he was the director of MIS at Long Island University. He received his Ph.D. and M.B.A. form the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, he received his B.S. in Chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India. His research interests and publications are in the areas of — Management of the Systems Development Process, Human Side of Information Technology, Social Issues of Information Technology, Global Issues of Information Technology, IT Applications and Architecture, Telecommuting, Computer Software Training Methods, Global Electronic Commerce, Global Outsourcing of IT and IT Enabled Services, and e-Government. He has published over 135 refereed articles in journals, conference proceedings, and books. His publications are in journals like the Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Information Systems, Information & Management, Journal of Systems Management, International Journal of Information Management, Electronic Markets, Information Resource Management Journal, Journal of Industrial Management and Data Systems, Journal of Global Information Management, and Journal of Information Systems Education. As Founding Editor, he edited the Journal of IT Case and Application Research (JITCAR) for 9 years during 1999-2007. Since 2002, he has been chairing the annual international smart-sourcing conferences (www.outsourceglobal.org). Over the years, he has been invited speaker to Germany, India, Italy, Singapore, Thailand, and Russia.