Symbiosis: Synergy of managing business-IT-alignment, IT-sourcing and offshoring success in society

Symbiosis means the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship, or a cooperative relationship. IT-outsourcing and off-shoring is momentarily far from a symbiosis. This proposal is meant to understand how sourcing can become true symbiosis between the involved parties, hence the name of our proposal. The importance of IT-outsourcing increased significantly the past few years. The last decade this sub-industry grew 20% annually reaching 6 billion Euro in 2004. Recently , offshoring (outsourcing to low-wage-countries) is gaining importance, as well. The goal of Symbiosis is to improve the maturity of IT-outsourcing and offshoring. Alignment between business and IT must be much more clear-cut than before, so that sourcing is a successful strategy to an effective and efficient IT-function. Moreover, Symbiosis increases our understanding whether outsourcing is technically feasible, economically justifiable, and societally acceptable. Symbiosis involves a large multi-client longitudinal study where experience with sourcing in-vivo is investigated. Symbiosis focuses on the software engineering aspects of IT-outsourcing and offshoring. Application development, its maintenance and exploitation will be studied along three important software engineering axes: software product, process and management. Symbiosis will develop predictive, qualitative and quantitative models to help turning outsourcing and offshoring into a success. Some important questions that Symbiosis will answer during the multi-client study: