Evaluation of the Outsourcing Services Customer
Rating
Bilous N.
Department of Computer Science
Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics
Kharkiv, Ukraine
Semerkov V.
Department of Computer Science
Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics
Kharkiv, Ukraine
Abstract—The given work is devoted to a series of issues
related to the potential, requirements and appropriate ways to
provide a successful outsourcing IT services to university
department with marketable IT expertise. University is IT
outsourcing partner which could catch special IT related needs
and tasks of the companies or business and provide through the
students those services for a profitable quantity/price ratio for
both sides.
The main question is how to figure out the real needs in IT of
a partner company and how to make sure that these needs are
not too difficult for the students within an university department
that is working for becoming a reliable IT outsourcing partner.
This work focuses on suggestions on how to classify the IT related
outsourcing possibilities to university. In the work represented
formula for ranking companies regarding the potential that their
outsourcing IT requirements will be within a low range solvable
by a university as subcontractor.
Keywords—outsourcing of IT services; questionnaire; rating;
customer; ranking formula.
I. INTRODUCTION
Outsourcing is the transferring of some industrial functions
or business processes from organization to a subcontractor
which specializes in necessary field. On outsourcing functions
on professional support of operability of separate systems are
transferred, as opposed to support having one-time or
incidental nature.
IT-outsourcing on base of technical universities nowadays
is one of the most perspective IT-industries directions as just
universities were and remain a place of concentration of
progressive ideas and are capable to react flexibly to a
changing situation, effectively implementing modern
technologies, including, in the field of IT-outsourcing. The
first such center in the Ukraine became the Outsourcing
Scientific Training and Production Center in Kharkiv National
University of Radio Electronics which was opened within the
international European project 530319-TEMPUS-1-2012-1-
DE-TEMPUS-JPHES “Innovation hybrid strategy of IT-
outsourcing partnership with enterprises” [1]. The outsourcing
center in university performs the package of measures which
directed on enhancement of educational system for training of
IT-specialists and also establishes stable relations with the
business for implementation on their base of the outsourcing
projects they need to work.
The implementation of hybrid strategy of partnership
between universities and the entities assumes increase of level
of practical training of students who are trained who are
trained in areas such as Computer Sciences, Program
Engineering and Computer Engineering. Direct participation
of future graduates in outsourcing projects, providing them of
additional opportunities of mastering knowledge will promote
finally to IT-market saturation by the educated specialists with
experience in outsourcing. By issuing a contract with the
university (in the composition of which includes outsourcing
center), the customer can be sure that the project is not a
“startup” on one specialist. At any time, the project could be
extended by any skilled specialist that removes the human
factor, in this case on the first place professionalism and
quality of service guarantees in their concurrency value.
In addition, outsourcing center is ready to provide
customers with complete IT-producing outsourcing services.
This is very important because different information
technology, which introduces small and medium business, it is
advisable to introduce in the complex. Otherwise, there is
duplication of automation of business processes and, as a
consequence, their appreciation of, on the one hand, and the
separation and the difficulty of implementation, on the other.
Ordering a comprehensive IT-support of outsourcing center
experts, customers can be sure of the effectiveness of
information to support the business processes of them
enterprises [2].
II. HOW TO FIND SUITABLE CUSTOMER
One of the main objectives of university outsourcing
training center is find of the suitable customer of outsourcing
services. Solved tasks should be provided to students. The
customer should know that the completed project will not have
such quality as the project completed by the professional
outsourcing company. More time will be spent for project
implementation. Due to this, the final cost of projects carried
out by a team of the outsourcing center, lower than that of IT-
companies. For the outsourcing center it is also important to
find a partner which also supports the university in aspects
related to project management.
To find the suitable customer, a questionnaire and a
formula to make a ranking score for the companies has been
designed.
III. USING THE QUESTIONNAIRE
The main approach for solving the problem of choosing a
partner-customer for IT-outsourcing is to carrying out survey
of potential customers of outsourcing center services to find
out that requirements of the customer to the implementable
project meet the capabilities of students to its successful
implementation.
The questionnaire should consist of the following parts:
1) Basic information
2) Minimum evaluation information
3) In-depth information
Each part contains a set of questions, which are divided
into the questions with and without impact on the assessment
of the customer. The questions which don't have influence are
used for administrative purposes or for provision of
information for adaptation of the questionnaire according to
knowledge and experience of outsourcing center students.
The questions influencing to the customer's assessment
have coefficients. The question coefficient usually equal to 1,
but can change depending on importance of the question.
Answer options in such question have scales which values
depend on nature of an answer option. The more strongly the
question affects the execution of future project, the greater
must be its coefficient, the more strongly the answer to the
question affects the execution of project, the greater must be
its weight.
IV. FORMULA FOR RANKING COMPANIES
The questionnaire should include as much as possible
factors affecting the possible future cooperation of the center
of outsourcing with the customer. A formula for ranking
companies easy to use and it can be easily implemented in a
computer-aided system to calculate an evaluation which
allows the outsourcing center manages to rank the possible IT
outsourcing partners.
The customer ranking is calculated by the following
formula:
(1)
where – customer evaluation, – question index, –
question coefficient value, – customer answer option value,
– number of quantifiable questions. Customer evaluation is
the sum of products of questions coefficients and weights of
answers to these questions.
Next, it is necessary to know what customer project can be
executed by team of students depending on the evaluation. For
this purpose on a formula (1) the greatest possible value
( ) of an evaluation is calculated. Compare the maximum
evaluation to customer evaluation:
– it is recommended to work with this
IT outsourcing partner;
– caution, working
with this IT outsourcing partner may be not suitable for the
outsourcing center;
– definitely not recommended; its
requirements are too high.
Some projects of customers are difficult or impracticable
for the center of outsourcing as the team of students of training
center has maturity level on the CMMI [3,4] equal 2 which
will raise during execution projects and training.
V. CONCLUSION
Thereby, questioning process which directly begins with
creation of the questionnaire can be applied to an assessment
of a rating of the customer of outsourcing services. Collected
information is divided into two main groups: classification and
estimative. Classification information contains information
that allows customers to divide into categories. The analysis of
estimative information allows revealing the possible customer
of services of the outsourcing center.
IT-outsourcing to the university outsourcing center can
enhance the practical training capability of university for IT
students and does increase their qualification for the IT
market. Further, it can help the IT-outsourcing partners to
keep track of the IT-trends without high expenses.
REFERENCES
[1] Бондаренко М.Ф., Белоус Н.В., Слипченко Н.И., Тучин О.В., “Концепция построения партнёрства между университетами и предприятиями Украины в области аутсорсинга”, Radioelectronics & Informatics, 2013. - №1. – С. 6-10.
[2] Bilous N. Outsourcing Training and Production Center (OSTPC). About us. Center Missions [Online]. Available: http://ostpcen.wordpress.com/about-us-center-missions/ [Accessed: Sept. 14, 2014].
[3] Watts S. Humphrey, “Managing Technical People. Innovation. Teamwork and the Software Process”, 5 print, Addison-Wesley, Reading MA 1999.
[4] Grausberg P., Kyamakya K., “On the classification of companies for a possible outsourcing of IT related services to universities”, Radioelectronics & Informatics, 2013. - №1. – P. 17-21.