Producing Comfort: Risk, Anxiety and Trust in the Development of an IS Offshoring Relationship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we explore the notion of anxiety and its management in the context of a model of offshore software development that is becoming increasingly common in the contemporary world. In particular, we have focused on the important question of how comfort is produced in circumstances that may involve high risk and a very opaque development processes, which are inherently difficult to monitor, not least because of issues associated with geographical and cultural separation. The paper is based on an ongoing in-depth, longitudinal, interpretive study of the development of an offshore IT sourcing relationship between a small Irish financial services firm (NetTrade) and a large Indian software development company (IndiaSoft) with an extensive global presence. The case focuses on a crucial 18 month period in NetTrade’s commercial evolution, during which a decision was made to outsource the development of a replacement for their core technology to one of IndiaSoft’s offshore development centers in India City. Specifically, we examine the ongoing implementation process as it unfolded; from NetTrade’s initial decision to look for a suitable vendor, through the development of the NetTrade-IndiaSoft relationship, to the delivery of the first major component of the system. The paper makes empirical and conceptual contributions. With respect to the former, we present a more in-depth, granular, and longitudinal processual account of an outsourcing relationship than is common in the extant literature. Furthermore, the case presented is somewhat distinctive because of the Ireland-India relationship and the fact that it involves a large vendor and a very small client firm. Finally, the perception on both client and vendor sides that the relationship was Global Information Technology Issues 2 Twenty Eighth International Conference on Information Systems, Montreal 2007 very successful, meant that informants were not afraid to speak candidly about the project dynamics; providing us with the opportunity to do a detailed anatomy of, what was for the most part, a well managed project. From a conceptual point of view, we draw on the extensive literature on risk and trust to synthesize a distinctive perspective that enables us to problematise and shed light on some crucial, yet intangible and often overlooked, aspects of offshoring practice. In particular, we aim to make visible the ‘relationship work’ required to develop and sustain the outsourcing partnership over time and geography.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".