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The purpose of this article is to examine why US companies outsource software development offshore and to present the factors to be considered to determine if the benefits of offshore outsourcing outweigh the drawbacks. Is offshoring worth it in terms of cost savings and quality? What are the risks associated with offshoring software development, and how can you hedge against such risks? What types of software should be considered for offshoring? How can you recognize the danger signs of offshore work going awry? Are there alternatives to outsourcing software development offshore, or are there alternative ways to offshore? Offshore outsourcing of software development may not be worth the risk in all cases. However, in the cases that it is worth moving offshore, this paper makes suggestions about how to help ensure success. This article presents advantages, disadvantages, risks and alternatives to offshore outsourcing of software development. Also, it provides alternatives for offshore outsourcing that will be useful for any company or individual considering offshore outsourcing.

This paper aims to contend that when tackling financial crimes such as money laundering and terrorist financing, international regulators are seeking to hold offshore jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands to higher standards and that this detracts from the pursuit of detecting and prosecuting money launders.

This paper will deal with the following perceived issues: firstly, to offshore jurisdictions as a concept; secondly, to outline the efforts made by the Cayman Islands to combat money laundering and to rate these changes against Financial Action Task Forces’ (FATAF’s) technical criteria; thirdly, to demonstrate that the Cayman Islands is among some of the world’s top jurisdictions for compliance with FATAF’s standards; and finally, to examine whether greylisting was necessary and to comment upon whether efforts by international regulators to hold offshore jurisdictions to higher standards detracts from the actual prosecution of money laundering within the jurisdiction.

Greylisting the Cayman Islands in these authors’ view was something that should have never happened; the Cayman Islands is being held to standards far beyond what is expected in an onshore jurisdiction. There is a need for harmonisation in respect of international anti money laundering rules and regulations to shift the tone to prosecution and investigation of offences rather than on rating jurisdictions technical compliance with procedural rules where states have a workable anti-money laundering (AML) regime.

The implications of this research are to show that offshore jurisdictions are being held by FATAF and other international regulators to higher AML standards than their onshore counterparties.

The author hopes that this paper will begin the debate as to whether FATAF needs to give reasons as to why offshore jurisdictions are held to higher standards and whether it needs to begin to contemplate higher onshore standards.

This is an original piece of research evaluating the effect of FATAF's reporting on offshore jurisdictions with a case study involving primary and secondary data in relation to the Cayman Islands.

Advances in information technology coupled with the need to build resilience against disruptions by pandemics like COVID-19 continue to emphasize offshoring services in the software industry. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have served as a key mechanism for safeguarding against risk in offshore service arrangements. Yet, variations in service cost and quality persist. This study aims to open up the blackbox linking SLAs to offshore project outcomes by examining (1) how the provisions in these contracts affect the ability of project teams – the work unit primarily in charge of producing the offshored service – to achieve their objectives and fulfill client requirements and (2) how differences in contextual factors shape the effects of these provisions.

The authors incorporate the role of organizational work practice differences to understand the challenges that 270 offshore project teams faced in coordinating and integrating technical and business domain knowledge across organizational boundaries in offshore arrangements. The examined offshore IT projects were managed by a leading software vendor in India and several of its US-based clients over a three-year period.

The authors demonstrate that organizational work practice differences represent a barrier to offshore project success, and that project team transition processes are an important mechanism for overcoming these barriers. Moreover, the authors find that transition processes represent key mediating mechanisms through which SLA provisions affect offshore project outcomes.

The study findings shed light on how SLAs shape software project teams' balance between activities aimed at meeting client needs and those aimed at containing costs.

This chapter examines why U.S. offshore wind farms do not exist and identifies sites most suitable for development based on European offshore wind farms. A survey of current literature indicates that U.S. development is stalled due to a lack of government and financial support. The literature identifies common attributes associated with the successful deployment of European offshore farms and provides a basis for a multi-criteria decision analysis of potential U.S offshore wind farm sites. A review of European wind farms indicates that a small, 10–50 MW farm located in shallow waters of less than 20 m might be more successful than previous U.S. development efforts. The review also identifies common European attributes deemed critical for success. These attributes are modified, taking into account unique U.S. factors, and a set of nine critical attributes are derived for use in a multi-criteria decision analysis model of suitable U.S. locations. The nine critical attributes (wind quality, water depth, shore distance, state support, public support, industrial support, population density, weather, and energy costs), along with associated utility function values, are applied to 23 past and current proposed U.S. sites. The model identified three sites, in Galveston Island, TX, Port Isabel, TX, and Block Island, RI, as being most favorable for a small wind farm.

For the first time since the “limits to growth” debate of the 1970s, we hear serious talk about the prospect of the world running out of oil. In the United States, concerns about reducing dependence on foreign oil have incited debate over the viability of alternative energy sources versus the oil industry's search for new oil “frontiers.” The rancorous dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) has captured the spotlight in this debate. Less controversial, but more significant for the future of U.S. oil production, are the bountiful “deepwater” reserves of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Offshore is central to the history of the petroleum industry over the last 50 years, and the GOM is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. In recent decades, revenue from offshore leasing has been second only to federal income taxes in value to the U.S. treasury. During the last 30 years, the search for oil and gas has continually moved into deeper waters and into new offshore environments. Still, the GOM remains the primary laboratory for technological innovation and regulatory practices. The recent and spectacular revival in production there thanks to deepwater discoveries has strongly reinforced this demonstration effect. As offshore oil assumes a high profile in national development strategies around the world, any effort to analyze the political, social, and economic aspects of offshore exploration and development must use the GOM as a historical precedent or basis of comparison.

We use experiential learning theory to develop new conceptual insights into offshore outsourcing of innovation. In particular, we show how offshore vendor firms are able to overcome liability of outsidership and eventually learn how to innovate on behalf of their onshore clients as a result of their embedment with clients across multiple teams. We theorize that the cross-border relocation of innovative activities from a client firm to an offshore vendor is only possible when teams within the vendor team have assumed a double-loop learning capability from the client allowing them to determine governing variables relating to the client’s organizational environment. Through direct on-the-job experience working with each other, international teams comprised in part from the vendor and in part from the client can undergo different learning transitions, which we classify as either relationship-oriented or task-oriented. These transitions determine the extent to which double-loop learning can be developed in offshore locations and are influenced by intra-team dynamics and the way the joint teams organize and manage themselves. Our perspective has implications for our understanding of organizational designs associated with both client and vendor multinational enterprises seeking to benefit from innovation in offshore outsourcing.

Despite being the standard against which all other offshore work sites are compared, the male-dominated work culture of the Gulf of Mexico has received little attention from social scientists. Drawing on the literature on women and work in the United States, on women in the U.S. South, in the military, and in the oil field, and on interviews with hundreds of individuals this paper explores the roles of women in the development and maintenance of the offshore oil and gas industry in southern Louisiana.

The primary objective of the present study is to explore the relationship between workplace spirituality and work stress among offshore and onshore employees of the Indian oil and gas industry. The present study also tends to study the difference in the stress level of offshore and onshore employees of the Oil and Gas Industry.

The size of the sample for the present study was 202 respondents. It includes 128 onshore employees and 74 offshore employees of oil and gas companies. Respondents were mainly managers and supervisors working in various departments of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Cairn India, Reliance India Ltd (RIL), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Indian Oil and Gas Ltd (IOCL). Since the different level of stress is experienced by employees at different stages of the organizational structure, thus study selected population comprising of managers and supervisors since they are believed to face similar work stressors. A variety of statistical tools like mean, t-test, correlation and multi-regression is used for the analysis of collected data.

Results show that all six dimensions of workplace spirituality are significantly negatively correlated with stress for onshore employees. However, the sense of community and gratitude are found insignificantly associated with stress for offshore employees. Stressful offshore conditions and excessive specialization might not allow offshore employees to cherish the community at the workplace and also the virtue of gratefulness. The offshore employees might have a certain level of gratitude and community system, but it is not sufficient for the employees to perceive a lower level of work relates to stress. The result gives the impression that the normal working conditions (onshore workplace) provide adequate opportunity to workplace spirituality to transcend its impact on work stress.

This is one of the pioneer studies that examined the role of workplace spirituality and stress in stress management of offshore and onshore employees of Indian Oil and gas companies.

This research extends existing services offshoring literature by investigating how the type of information exchanged, technical support or personal billing, in conjunction with country-of-service-origin (COSO) influences consumer likelihood to react negatively (boycott issue importance, NWOM, perceived service quality) to an offshore service exchange.

Structural equations modelling is employed to assess relationships among constructs when country of service origin (New Zealand and the Philippines) and type of service provided (technical support and personal billing services) are varied. Using a scenario-based experimental design we collected 337 responses from a consumer panel across Australia.

Results indicate that both COSO and type of information exchanged affect service sentiment. Overall, consumers feel more negative and more likely to punish a company for offshoring to culturally dissimilar countries such as the Philippines than to culturally similar ones such as New Zealand. However, consumers were more concerned with personal billing services provided from offshore providers than technical support, regardless of COSO.

Practitioners need to understand customer sentiment about services offshoring in general as well as the relationship between service type and country of service origin when designing the global service supply chain.

This study extends theory by applying a multi-dimensional portfolio perspective in examining customer sentiment of offshore services. Understanding the underlying bases of customer concerns and how companies can mitigate negative perceptions allows firms to better manage service offshore strategy.

While the phenomenon of R&D offshoring has become increasingly popular, scholars have mostly focused on R&D offshore outsourcing from the point of view of the client firms, who are often from an advanced country. By examining vendor firms, in this paper the authors shift the focus to the second party in the dyadic relationship of R&D offshore outsourcing. Specifically, the authors compare vendor firms with nonvendor firms from the same emerging economy and industry to look at whether vendor firms from emerging economies can improve their innovation performance by learning from their clients. The authors also look at the role of depth and breadth of existing technological capabilities of the vendor firm in its ability to improve its innovation performance.

This study is based on firm-level data from the Indian biopharmaceutical industry between 2005 and 2016. The authors use the Heckman two-stage model to control for self-selection by firms. The authors compare the innovation performance of vendor firms with nonvendor biopharmaceutical firms (group vs nongroup analysis) as well as innovation performance across vendor firms (within group comparison).

The authors find that, compared to nonvendor firms, R&D offshore outsourcing vendor firms from emerging economies have higher innovation performance. The authors argue that this higher innovation performance among vendor firms is due to learning from their clients. Among vendor firms, the authors find that the innovation gains are contingent upon the two factors of depth and breadth of the vendor firms' technological capabilities.

This paper makes three contributions: First, the authors augment the nascent stream of research on innovation from emerging economy firms. The authors introduce a new mechanism for emerging economy firms to learn and upgrade their capabilities. Second, the authors contribute to the literature on global value chains, by showing that vendor firms are able to learn from their clients and upgrade their capabilities. Third, by examining the innovation by vendor firms, the authors contribute to the R&D offshore outsourcing, which has largely focused on the client.

The study findings have important implications for both clients and vendors. For client firms, the authors provide evidence that knowledge spillovers do happen, and R&D offshore outsourcing can turn vendors into potential competitors. This research helps firms from emerging economies by showing that becoming vendors for R&D offshore outsourcing is a viable option to learn from foreign firms and improve innovation performance. Going outside geographic boundaries may be a large hurdle for these resource-strapped, emerging economy firms. Providing offshore outsourcing services for narrow slices of R&D activities may be a starting point for these firms to upgrade their capabilities.

This paper is among the first to quantitatively study the innovation performance of vendor firms from emerging economies. The authors also contribute to the nascent literature on innovation in emerging economy firms by showing that providing R&D offshore outsourcing services to client firms from advanced countries can improve firms' innovation performance.