Mapping Critical Success Factors for IT Outsourcing: The Providers' Perspective

During the last decades, IT Outsourcing gained considerable management attention and is considered a strategic decision used to promote success on its variable dimensions, like: cost reduction, quality improvement, access to new technologies, among others. The existing literature presents many studies on IT Outsourcing. However, there are few studies from the provider's perspective. Therefore, the objective is to focus on providers' critical success factors and their relationships in IT Outsourcing contracts. To analyse this subject a qualitative approach based on cognitive mapping process was applied. Cognitive or causal maps are widely employed in problem-structuring, since they permit a rich representation of ideas, through the modelling of a complex network of actions. This approach is innovative compared to the traditional quantitative methods used. As a result, authors were able to map a network of means and ends and in parallel were found new success factors like service standardization, price flexibility, cost management and service catalogue, which allowed obtaining new insights into the structure of today's IT Outsourcing contracts.