Barriers to Software Outsourcing Partnership Formation: An Exploratory Analysis

Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is a type of cooperative client-vendor relationship. SOP is an emerging strategy and is different from ordinary software development outsourcing (SDO). Usually, a fruitful outsourcing association might be converted to an outsourcing partnership. Conversely, SOP is not a risk-free business, numerous barriers associated with SOP. The overarching target of this exploratory paper is to find and analyze a list of barriers that are considered obstacles for vendors in the conversion of their surviving contractual outsourcing relationship to a partnership. Firstly, twenty-six barriers to SOP formation were identified through systematic literature review (SLR) from a sample of 106 papers and then an empirical survey was conducted with fifty experts to analyze the significance and applicability of these barriers in the SOP context. The identified barriers were further analyzed based on five variables such as decades, company size, continents, location of analysis, and perspective of the study. Ten barriers were considered as critical barriers (CBs) via SLR. Industrial experts indicate they extremely agree with five CBs. Eight CBs were equally reported on all continents. We found ten CBs common in all types of organizations. Further, twelve CBs were shared in both decades while ten CBs were found common in both academia and industry. Furthermore, four CBs were specific to clients; five were specific to vendors while ten were common to both. The association of various barriers with SOP formation is found statistically significant for twenty-five barriers with effect size (0.41 <; Ø <; 0.90, p <; 0.05). Stakeholders in SOP should address all the listed barriers especially the critical ones to attain a partner position.