Real-life case studies of offshore outsourced IS projects: Analysis of issues and socio-economic paradigms

The primary purpose of this chapter is to present descriptive real-life case studies of different offshore-outsourced custom software development projects (that the author has actually worked for). The first case study discusses the practical issues in two fixed-term/fixed-price custom software development projects that were offshoreoutsourced. The second case study discusses the practical issues in the offshore-outsourcing of a time and materials custom software development project to multiple vendors, which involved simultaneous insourcing, onshore-outsourcing and offshore-outsourcing. Furthermore, the observations and issues from these case studies are analyzed by comparing them with the paradigms of socio-economic theories that have been adopted extensively in the academic IS outsourcing literature (namely the agency theory, transaction cost theory, innovation diffusion theory, social exchange theory, and power-politics theory).