AlHammadi, Huda Mohamed2013-07-092013-07-092009-0360050http://bspace.buid.ac.ae/handle/1234/237DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTIONNowadays, 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.enIT OutsourcingGovernment OrganizationsUnited Arab Emirates (UAE)performancecustomer satisfactionDissertation