A Systematic Approach to Optimise Management in Global Sourcing Relationships

Despite a large number of studies, global IT sourcing projects are, in practice, performed ad-hoc and rely mostly on the manager’s experience. Outsourcing software development presents extra challenges because development is performed in an inter-organisational network. Although organisations collaborate by transferring knowledge from the customer to the vendor (e.g., requirements) and from the vendor to the client (e.g., product and status reports), each has its own interests and needs; which often conflict. Tacit requirements, conflicting interests and knowledge-domain gaps contribute to generate final solutions that cost more in terms of resources than what was originally planned or that do not help customers to meet their ambitions. In this work we propose eStudio, our semi-automatic quantitative-data based framework to provide guidance to reason about obstacles in, for instance, knowledge co-ordination.