Modelling the Price, Performance and Contract Characteristics of it Outsourcing
通过48份IT支持与维护合同数据，用递归回归模型分析价格、绩效与合同特征的关系，发现首次合同更贵，竞争性招标虽未降低价格但提升了绩效。
The rapidly increasing use of outsourcing for IT services, both in the public and private sectors, has attracted much interest from researchers and practitioners alike. While early studies of IT outsourcing were largely qualitative in nature, more recent studies have attempted to analyse the outcomes achieved in quantitative terms. This paper is consistent with the latter, but goes further by modelling the price, performance and contract characteristics that are relevant to IT outsourcing. A two-equation recursive regression model was used to analyse 48 contracts for IT support and maintenance. The results did not reveal any quantitatively significant price-performance trade-off, but did suggest that first-term contracts (i.e. the first ever contract awarded by a client for the provision of a particular IT service) were more expensive than repeat contracts. Although competitive tendering did not result in lower prices than directly negotiated contracts, it was associated with comparatively better performance. Well-defined expectations of an organization's IT requirements were also likely to lead to improved performance when the service was outsourced.