Resumo

Outsourcing occurs whenever companies aim at cost reduction and efficiency in resource allocation. Public enterprises are pressured to mimic private companies in pursuing procedures that resemble private organizations’ partnerships. Yet in public enterprises, IT outsourcing is done through competitive bidding, as government retains control over service specification, contract management, and performance assessment, limiting the application of former studies’ findings to the public sector. This study aims at evaluating the monitoring of outsourced IT contracts in public companies.

his complex and multidimensional problem of IT outsourcing in the public sector still needs further studies, either in the technology aspect, helping governments use IT to improve public services, or from the government enterprises standpoint, which should use IT to solve their problems. To mitigate such conceptual inconsistencies, we propose using an altered Multicriteria Decision Analysis procedure(Fuzzy AHP - Analytic Hierarchy Process) to elicit the constructs and their order of magnitude in strategic decision making

Current literature points to several concepts in IT outsourcing. Yet, this literature was almost exclusively applied in private organizations, which makes their application to public bodies susceptible of retesting or adaptation. Using a Pareto-like approach, we selected the four most important concepts (Monitoring Control, Empirical Evidence, Service Level Agreement, and Knowledge Transfer) and tested their differences across different organizational levels.

To mitigate such conceptual inconsistencies, we propose using an altered Multicriteria Decision Analysis (Fuzzy AHP - Analytic Hierarchy Process) to elicit the constructs and their order of magnitude in strategic decision making. To do so, we have gathered data from the high echelon, middle management and operational level, in a large IT-focused public company in São Paulo, Brazil. We innovate in propose a weighting procedure to accomodate different organizational levels in the same fuzzy AHP.

Four main concepts related to contractual management emerge as significant: Service Level Agreement (SLA), empirical evidences, monitoring control, and knowledge transfer from the outsourced company to the public company. However different organizational levels do not interpret these in the same manner of importance. The results point to middle management as having the less distorted view of all, if compared to the aggregate global scores. This research aims at contributing to the understanding of the relationship between the monitoring or supervision of IT contracts.

This research offers gaps to future research in public IT companies, such as greater oversight of outsourced companies that outsource contracted activities. Another possibility is a strategic level research, observing the influence of top management on IT outsourcing. We also suggest a relational management study encouraging the public sector to consider the inclusion of more flexible contractual clauses during IT contract enforcement, emphasizing greater stakeholder management and knowledge sharing among outsourced IT companies and public companies.

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