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Almost all IT, engineering research, financial analysis, and manufacturing industries are confronted with a question: to outsource or not? The outsourcing and offshoring trend is inspired by success stories of huge cost savings, decreased time-to-market, and better quality. Simultaneously, outsourcing-gone-bad stories highlight how hidden costs exceed benefits, cross-cultural problems impact quality, and intellectual property risks shadow project lifecycles. Managers in companies are presented with a confusing picture for which there are no easy answers. Companies, vendors, and policymakers need a framework to understand the outsourcing phenomenon and plan implementation strategies for outsourced projects. At present, many companies go with the gut based on the experience of others and media reports. But very rarely are two technical documentation tasks alike and never are the concerns of two technical communication tasks the same. This tutorial presents the twelve driver framework and the driver-model percentage matrix to assess the benefits and risks of outsourcing a technical communication task. In the end, qualitative decision-making will determine an organization's decision about outsourcing, but the use of such a framework and related metrics will greatly enhance the quality of the final choice.
View all four works by Padmanabhan, Poornima
View all 34 works published by IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication |
Technical Communication Outsourcing: The Twelve Driver Framework Tutorial
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2007.897603
 access restricted (by the publisher) to members/subscribers/customers only
 peer-reviewed
Padmanabhan, Poornima
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
2007
Abstract: Almost all IT, engineering research, financial analysis, and manufacturing industries are confronted with a question: to outsource or not? The outsourcing and offshoring trend is inspired by success stories of huge cost savings, decreased time-to-market, and better quality. Simultaneously, outsourcing-gone-bad stories highlight how hidden costs exceed benefits, cross-cultural problems impact quality, and intellectual property risks shadow project lifecycles. Managers in companies are presented with a confusing picture for which there are no easy answers. Companies, vendors, and policymakers need a framework to understand the outsourcing phenomenon and plan implementation strategies for outsourced projects. At present, many companies go with the gut based on the experience of others and media reports. But very rarely are two technical documentation tasks alike and never are the concerns of two technical communication tasks the same. This tutorial presents the twelve driver framework and the driver-model percentage matrix to assess the benefits and risks of outsourcing a technical communication task. In the end, qualitative decision-making will determine an organization's decision about outsourcing, but the use of such a framework and related metrics will greatly enhance the quality of the final choice.
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