Measuring user satisfaction in an outsourcing environment

Outsourcing is a term that encompasses a variety of approaches to contracting for information technology (IT) services. It is defined as a transfer of any particular IT activity or a combination of activities from an organization using them to one or more external service providers. IT outsourcing leads to significant changes in the management processes of the IT organization. For example, while IT managers have always had the responsibility for ensuring that users within their organization maintain a high degree of satisfaction, they now have to monitor the quality of service, even though they are no longer the providers of the service. This gets further complicated when only some parts of the IT functions are outsourced while others are provided by an internal IT department. Thus, developing a comprehensive set of measurement tools and mechanisms is an important step toward monitoring the quality of service provided by both an outside source and an IT department. This paper investigates the usefulness of an existing user-satisfaction measurement instrument for identifying problem areas in a multiprovider outsourcing environment, where an external service provider and an internal IT department each has different roles in the system. It discusses the rationale for measuring user satisfaction and the instruments to carry out the measurement procedure. It reports the results of implementing and testing a previously developed, documented, and validated user-satisfaction instrument in an outsourcing environment and draws practical conclusions from the results.