IT Outsourcing in Government Organizations in United Arab Emirates
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Date
2009-03
Authors
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Publisher
British University in Dubai
Abstract
Nowadays, IT outsourcing has become widely used by private and public
organizations as a strategic option. Outsourcing the internal IT operations and
functions to external service providers is increasing in government organizations in
United Arab Emirates. The effort in this report is to investigate the practice of IT
outsourcing in UAE government organizations in term of identifying outsourcing
decisions drivers and motivators, the drawbacks and risk, assessing the performance
of the practice and how outsourcing is affecting customer satisfaction. Furthermore,
this research paper will establish the requirements necessary to implement effective
outsourcing.
The primary research method used in this paper was to carry out case studies on the
practices of IT outsourcing in government organizations. According to the
investigation, outsourcing is practiced mainly in large government organizations
where IT is the backbone of the daily and future operations of the organizations. The
implementation of outsourcing in the discussed case studies range from one to three
years old in the three government organizations included in this paper. Hence, all the
implementations are new due to the recently growing interest of UAE government
organizations to outsourcing their functions. Face to face interviews with senior
employees who participated in the outsourcing were conducted for data collection
along with analyzing documents provided by the organizations and observing the
practice of outsourcing. Moreover, secondary research methods represented by the
academic online journals, electronic books and newspapers were used to collect data
about outsourcing.
The implementation of IT outsourcing in each case study is unique for every
government organizations due to the distinct circumstances and conditions that were
surrounding the life cycle of outsourcing. Therefore the advantages and disadvantages
vary among the case studies. However, the main driver for outsourcing in government
organizations and the outsourced functions are common among the case studies. Cost
saving and improve the quality of services by focusing on core competency are the
main expectations of contracting out internal IT functions to external private firms.
Another finding is that government organizations are keen to maintain their core
competency and none process oriented functions internally. The research paper provides recommendations for each cases study in order to
improve the current and future implementation of IT outsourcing. The main
recommendation is to follow the life cycle of outsourcing in order to maximum the
benefits and minimize, contain and avoid the risks and disadvantages accompany
outsourcing. Moreover, the external service provider should be selected carefully and
the SLA and contract should be defined preciously, flexible and managed closely by
dedicated internal resources.
Description
DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTION
Keywords
IT Outsourcing, Government Organizations, United Arab Emirates (UAE), performance, customer satisfaction