Abstract:
Outsourcing has become common in today’s working environment. The software outsourcing
plays a vital role in automation of the public services around the world. The area of this
research is under-studied and published literature was not found in Sri Lanka. Public sector
outsourcing projects are time consuming activities due to various reasons. Therefore the
government officers have a very negative attitude on automation among the public
organizations such as ministries, departments, statutory boards, authorities, commissions and
public companies. Outsourcing organizations need to implement changes cautiously and
evaluate their in-house capabilities. They also need to fully understand and apply the
software outsourcing investment evaluation and benefits realization processes. In order to
reach the degree of improvements, the Best Practices would be identified by this research.
All these are to be done before and during the vendor/technology selection assessment and
contract negotiation process. The data was collected from the survey of fourteen (14)
organizations based on thirty (30) projects and two hundred and twelve (212) system users
from the public sector organizations. The users were included from the all the categories of
the organizations such as top, middle and junior staff members. The status of those projects
include success, failure, partial failure and in developing stage. While doing the research
several key issues were identified in outsourcing application software life cycle and those
were discussed in the research too. The research has identified success, failure factors and
software outsourcing success from the literature survey to design a conceptual model and
introduced the Best Practices for the Sri Lankan context. The model was tested by identifying
the relationship between success and prevention of failure factors with outsourcing success.
This study will help the management and the Information Technology staff to identify the
failure factors and take the necessary precautions using Best Practices. Hence, this study is
timely and relevant for the public sector organizations in Sri Lanka as they are working
towards the e-Government.
