Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1. continued
Risks (and references)
Description
Occurrence of disasters.
(Aubert et al., 2005; Dhar & Balakrishnan, 2006).
The organization may incur in costs due to a loss of control over disaster
recovery, loss of data or vital information, since the outsourced activities are
performed outside the organization.
A lower IS/IT physical security.
(Kakumanu & Portanova, 2006; Varajão, 2002;
Wright, 2004).
On an Outsourcing relation the organization can assign to the Provider some IS/
IT security related aspects as the control over physical access to the system, its
location, the backups location and the backups system frequency.
Increasing problems on human resources manage-
ment (IS staffing).
(Deloitte, 2005; IDC, 2004; IDC, 2005; Varajão,
2002; Wright, 2004).
When an organization decides to outsource it may experience new human
resources issues. As examples it is possible to point out the change in employee
skill sets, people resistance and demotivation, potential people transfer problems
or people dismissal.
to “most important”, “neutral” and “less im-
portant”. Within these groups the expert should
choose the most and the less important issue in
comparison to others until all the issues of the
group are evaluated. At the end of this procedure
one obtain a ranked list of issues sorted by their
importance. A peculiar feature of this technique
is that the certainties about the issues are at the
top and at the bottom of the list since the experts
have the greatest convictions about what it is “most
important” and “less important” (Santos, 2004).
small values of W can be significant so the panel
achieved a satisfactory consensus.
There is a levelling off of W (Table 4) between
rounds which is a criteria pointed out by Schmidt
(1997) to stop Delphi process. This group has low
convergence for both lists.
A deeper research on previous literature has
found possible causes/explanations for this result.
A study carried out among the largest Spanish
firms (Gonzalez et al., 2005a) shows a certain
dependency between the degree of Outsourcing,
the size of the organization and the risks they fear
most. Gonzalez et al., 2005a found that risks are
identical for different organizations independently
of the activity sector they belong to. However,
the significance given to risks is close related
to the degree of Outsourcing and the size of the
organization (measured by number of workers and
business volume). These authors discovered that
small organizations fear mainly the dependence on
the provider while large firms show more concern
about the possible opposition to Outsourcing of
their IS department staff. Although the business
volume of the participant organizations in the pres-
ent study is the same, they have different amount
of workers, which may have been an influence
over the findings. Also, the degree of Outsourcing,
which is another factor that contribute for this ef-
fect, is probably different among the organizations.
The findings of Gonzalez et al. (2005c) show
that the size of the organization and the activity sec-
tor can influence the importance given to benefits.
number of rounds
The common number of rounds to collect data
found in previous studies is from two to four (Cam-
pos, 1998), depending on the participation rate,
the time available to collect data or the structure
of the Delphi study. The many the rounds the less
is the participation rate (Santos & Amaral, 2004).
For the present Delphi study two rounds were
conducted. For the first round the level of consen-
sus attained for the ordered lists was low or not
significant, so a second round was undertaken to
attempt a consensus improvement. This second
round allowed experts to review their answers
and it was possible to consolidate the sorted lists
from the previous round.
As shown in Table 3 there is a lack of progress
from round one to round two which indicates
the Delphi process can be stopped. According to
Schmidt (1997) for a panel of this size even very
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