Quality in ICT Outsourcing and Insourcing

The ICT industry is becoming global. More and more companies are establishing partnerships with ICT organizations. The diversity of culture and the dispersion over time and space require novel techniques, tools, and practices from many disciplines to overcome challenges and to take advantage of opportunities global ICT engineering offers. While it can bring several benefits, ICT outsourcing entails some risks. As it is the case in other types of investments or business ventures, the risk associated to an ICT outsourcing project must be evaluated and managed.
In times of crisis such as the one that we have been going through in the international financial markets, with dramatic consequences in many countries, many companies have started to implement ICT insourcing strategies. Insourcing (or contracting in) is often defined as the delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal (but 'stand-alone') entity that specializes in that operation. ICT insourcing is a business decision that is often made to maintain control of critical production or competencies, while reducing costs. This movement towards ICT insourcing also has roots on the fact that many companies had less than satisfactory experiences with ICT outsourcing, including poor performance in customer support by companies who provide 24/7 customer and technical support.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Getting started with ICT outsourcing and insourcing initiatives
• Managing and governing ICT outsourcing and insourcing projects in a global market
• Assessing the quality of service (QoS) in ICT outsourcing and insourcing initiatives
• Risk models and risk assessment in the context of ICT outsourcing and insourcing
• Business and ethics in ICT outsourcing and insourcing
• Human and socio-technical factors in ICT outsourcing and insourcing ventures
• Knowledge management in ICT outsourcing and insourcing partnerships
• The role of ICT process maturity frameworks (e.g. CMMI, SPICE) in establishing outsourcing and insourcing partnerships
• Agile versus planned approaches in ICT outsourcing and insourcing initiatives
• Ousourcing and insourcing in a global software development world
• ICT outsourcing and insourcing in the context of software ecosystems
• Empirical studies in the context of ICT out-sourced or in-sourced projects

Authors should submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=quatic2010 a PDF version of their paper. Papers must be in IEEE format and not exceed 6 pages, including figures, references, and appendices. Submissions must be original and will be reviewed by the Track Program Committee. Accepted papers will be published in the electronic IEEE proceedings of QUATIC’2010, subject to one of the authors registering for the conference. The authors of the 3 best papers of this thematic track will be invited to submit extended versions to the main track of the conference. More info on the QUATIC’2010 selection process and its tracks can be found at http://www.fe.up.pt/quatic2010.

• Chair - Fernando Brito e Abreu (FCT/UNL)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - Isabel Margarido (FEUP)

• Jaap Gordijn, Vrije Universiteit, The Netherlands
• Ning Su, University of Western Ontario, Canada and New York University, USA
• Hoon S.Cha, Salisbury University, USA
• Luigi Telesca, CREATE-NET, Italy

quality_in_ict_outsourcing_and_insourcing.pdf

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