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The paper reconstructs the ways of attributing meanings to IT specialists’ careers at BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) centers in Poland. The findings rely on empirical data, collected through autobiographical narrative interviews. The technique of analysis applied in the study was inspired by grounded theory methodology and allowed for the identification of a basic social process at the analytical stage, namely, “career planning.” On the one hand, the analysis also showed how IT specialists’ careers are given meanings concerning career planning; there seem to be three main ways of understanding one’s career in IT: (1) in terms of reaching economic and social stability, (2) as a tran- sition period in a career as an IT specialist, (3) with regard to becoming an expert in IT. On the other hand, the second axis of analysis has been conceptualized, which is comprised of other subjective and objective elements that may shape career planning. These include the biographical experiences of work, the context of the Polish BPO industry, and career planning resources. Furthermore, a typology consisting of three ways of attributing meanings to IT specialists’ careers at BPO centers has been put forward and analyzed.

Purpose: This research aims to develop a digital capability maturity model to find the critical capability and define the maturity level of the digital services creation process for the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, which services cover the end-to-end client’s non-core activities involving people, process, and technology.Design/methodology/approach: The study conducts qualitative approaches in variables selection using grounded theory, followed by in-depth interviews and focus group discussion confirming the chosen variables as relevant capabilities. Additionally, quantitative approaches are used to define the impact of those capabilities on the process through an online survey of 208 employees and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) for model analysis.Findings: The research proves that alignment strategy has a positive impact on the organizational and individual capabilities, both of which have a positive impact on the process. All capabilities are defined in the “quantitatively managed” maturity level, while the collaboration culture and value creation skill indicators are required to be prioritized in development for having a significant driver yet an inferior performance.Practical implications: The proposed model is built to be generally utilized to help the BPO companies understand their critical capabilities and improve their maturity level to lead the industry. The research contribution is not only to develop a model that is suitable for a particular business but also to create more value for academic purposes through improving the model by introducing a new variable \"alignment strategy\" and “organizational capability” as an essential component influencing the process.Originality/value: This is a multimethod study that elaborates empirical evidence, literature review, and professional judgment to assess the capabilities of the digital services creation process, to prove the importance of alignment between those capabilities, and to define the process maturity level.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to understand the roles various drivers such as cost, strategy and risk play when business process outsourcing/information technology enabled services (BPO/ITES) firms in India outsource their information technology (IT) functions to third-party vendors. If all key drivers associated with IT outsourcing were understood, and such knowledge of those variables was incorporated into the reasons for outsourcing, there would be a greater probability of a successful outcome. Design/methodology/approach - A \"hybrid\" (quantitative and qualitative) research methodology was used to gain insight into the IT-outsourcing paradigm by BPO/ITES firms in India. A structured questionnaire related to IT-outsourcing activities conducted from 1999 to 2010 was distributed to nine firms. The resulting data were then analyzed. In addition, two Indian BPO/ITES firms that had outsourced their IT to a third-party vendor to cut cost generously granted in-depth information into their IT-outsourcing paradigm and life cycle. Findings - IT outsourcing is perhaps more complicated than other types of outsourcing. Focussing purely on cost is very risky. Practitioners need to take all three drivers - cost, strategy and risk into consideration. Any degradation of services or responsibilities due to IT outsourcing would mean a very unhappy client or even loss of business. Originality/value - BPO/ITES firms in India tend to focus only on cost reduction from IT outsourcing without taking into consideration other equally important drivers such as strategy and risk. This paper counsels a holistic approach toward IT outsourcing for a successful outcome. In addition, an IT-outsourcing framework and guide is proposed for practitioners.

This study explores the green IT adoption experience of organizations within the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines using a multi-theory perspective. Through a multiple case study with three organizations, it presents a holistic account of the factors in green IT adoption. This study shows the usefulness of complementarily deploying adoption theory and offers important theoretical and practical implications for organizations as they extend their BPO operations globally. In this study, the authors discovered that technological and organizational context factors have greater positive impact on Green IT adoption within BPO organizations while environmental context factors have lesser impact in decision-making processes.

S. Alter's Work System Method is used in advancing the understanding and analyses of service innovation Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) from a business systems viewpoint. We propose to use this framework to distinguish what usually characterizes IT-enabled BPO service innovations, and which implications could be drawn for the underlying IS's design. We focus our analysis guided by the Traffic point banking BPO case study in Egypt. This paper brings forward important IS design considerations to the attention of systems analysts and designers to take into consideration while working on the conceptions of Innovative Service BPOs.

Impact sourcing is the practice of employing socio-economically disadvantaged individuals at business process outsourcing centres to reduce poverty and create secure jobs. One of the pioneers of impact sourcing is Sama, a training-data company that focuses on annotating data for artificial intelligence (AI) systems and claims to support an ethical AI supply chain through its business operations. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at three of Sama’s East African delivery centres in Kenya and Uganda and follow-up online interviews, this article interrogates Sama’s claims regarding the benefits of its impact sourcing model. Our analysis reveals alarming accounts of low wages, insecure work, a tightly disciplined labour management process, gender-based exploitation and harassment and a system designed to extract value from low-paid workers to produce profits for investors. We argue that competitive market-based dynamics generate a powerful force that pushes such companies towards limiting the actual social impact of their business model in favour of ensuring higher profit margins. This force can be resisted, but only through countervailing measures such as pressure from organised workers, civil society, or regulation. These findings have broad implications related to working conditions for low-wage data annotators across the sector and cast doubt on the ethical nature of AI products that rely on this form of AI data work.

This article provides a new typology for understanding human labour integrated into the production of artificial intelligence systems through data preparation and model evaluation. We call these forms of labour ‘AI data work’ and show how they are an important and necessary element of the artificial intelligence production process. We draw on fieldwork with an artificial intelligence data business process outsourcing centre specialising in computer vision data, alongside a decade of fieldwork with microwork platforms, business process outsourcing, and artificial intelligence companies to help dispel confusion around the multiple concepts and frames that encompass artificial intelligence data work including ‘ghost work’, ‘microwork’, ‘crowdwork’ and ‘cloudwork’. We argue that these different frames of reference obscure important differences between how this labour is organised in different contexts. The article provides a conceptual division between the different types of artificial intelligence data work institutions and the different stages of what we call the artificial intelligence data pipeline. This article thus contributes to our understanding of how the practices of workers become a valuable commodity integrated into global artificial intelligence production networks.

The global offshore outsourcing market for IT and business services exceeded $55 billion in 2008 and some estimates suggest an annual growth rate of 20% over the next five years. Furthermore, over 200 firms from the Forbes 2000 companies and 50 per cent of the Fortune Global 500 had offshored IT and business process activities through captive centres, making a total of about $9bn of business. The phenomenon of offshoring and offshore-outsourcing is certainly expanding. It has become increasingly important to understand the phenomenon, not least as a basis for suggesting what directions it will take, its impacts, how it has been conducted, and how its management can be better facilitated. This book offers a broad perspective on various issues relating to the sourcing of systems and business processes in a national and global context. The authors examine both the client's and the vendor's involvement in sourcing relationships by putting the emphasis on the capabilities that each side should develop prior to entering a relationship but also that they should develop as a result of their interactions with each other.

In recent years, Internet connectivity has greatly improved across the African continent. This article examines the consequences that this shift has had for East African firms that are part of global value chains (GVCs). Prior work yielded contradictory expectations: firms might benefit from connectivity through increased efficiencies and improved access to markets, although they might also be further marginalized through increasing control of lead firms. Drawing on extensive qualitative research in Kenya and Rwanda, including 264 interviews, we examine 3 sectors (tea, tourism, and business process outsourcing) exploring overarching, cross-cutting themes. The findings support more pessimistic expectations: small African producers are only thinly digitally integrated in GVCs. Moreover, shifting modes of value chain governance, supported by lead firms and facilitated by digital information platforms and data standards are leading to new challenges for firms looking to digitally integrate. Nevertheless, we also find examples in these sectors of opportunities where small firms are able to cater to emerging niche customers, and local or regional markets. Overall, the study shows that improving connectivity does not inherently benefit African firms in GVCs without support for complementary capacity and competitive advantages.

The 2010 Journal of Information Technology (JIT) article, ‘A Review of the IT Outsourcing Empirical Literature and Future Research Directions,’ analyzed 741 findings on the determinants of Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) decisions and outcomes from 164 empirical articles published between 1992 and 2010. Using the same coding method, the 2011 JIT article, ‘Business Process Outsourcing Studies: A Critical Review and Research Directions,’ analyzed 615 findings on the determinants of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) decisions and outcomes from 67 empirical articles published between 1996 and 2011. Taken together, these two reviews found that the preponderance of evidence from both ITO and BPO research streams produced largely consistent results pertaining to the categories of independent variables that affected outsourcing decisions and outcomes. To investigate the most current research findings on business services, which comprise ITO and BPO, and to compare the results with the prior JIT reviews, we replicated the method used in the prior JIT reviews. In this update, we examined 174 newly published articles across 78 academic journals published between 2010 and 2014. We found that researchers have significantly expanded the variables of interest in the last 4 years. In all, researchers investigated 69 new variables. Compared with earlier research, this review of recent articles found a deeper exploration of the direct effects of transaction attributes, sourcing motivations, client and provider capabilities, and governance on sourcing decisions and outcomes. Researchers have also studied a broader variety of sourcing decisions, including shared services, captive centers, rural sourcing and backsourcing. This update also found a more nuanced understanding of relational governance and its interaction with contractual governance. We assessed the research progress that has been made on ten previously identified gaps in knowledge. We proposed a future research agenda that includes continued, incremental progress on ‘normal science’ research questions, as well as more ambitious research goals. We challenged researchers to investigate how sourcing clients, providers, and advisors can protect jobs, protect the environment, and ensure security in an increasingly automated world.