An Empirical Study On IS Outsourcing Enterprises’ Boundary Expansion And Outsourcing Performance

Based on the previous research, we found that in the background of cross cultural IT outsourcing, a phenomenon called boundary expansion clearly existed among the relationship of suppliers and clients. We separated boundary expansion into two process, boundary spanning and network expansion, and analyzed their relationship with supplier’s IT outsourcing performance together. For this research, we went to20companies of Beijing Zhongguancun Software Park, Shanghai Pudong Software Park, and Xi’an Software Park to make some interview with high level managers and questionnaire investigation with employees of IT working teams of these companies. We used quality analysis software Nvivo8to make a grounded research by one written transcript for ensuring the key variables, and collected292samples and used SPSS16.0and AMOS17.0to conduct the statistical analysis by these variables. Then we made sure the relationship among communication, client’s knowledge sharing, boundary spanning and network expansion and their effects towards supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. We also conducted a clearly research on how the process of boundary spanning and network expansion affected supplier’s IT outsourcing performance.The empirical results show that communication has strong and direct effect on client’s knowledge sharing, boundary spanning, network expansion and supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. Client’s knowledge sharing has strong and direct effect on boundary spanning, network expansion and supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. Boundary spanning has strong and direct effect on network expansion and network expansion has strong and direct effect on supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. When the level of network expansion is low, the higher the level of boundary spanning, the better the supplier’s IT outsourcing performance is. However, when the level of network expansion is high, the increase of the level of boundary spanning has negative effects on supplier’s IT outsourcing performance at the beginning. But as this negative effects decreasing at a certain level, boundary spanning starts to have a positive effect on supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. The whole picture of their effects is as a U and as the time passing by, the effect of boundary spanning and supplier’s IT outsourcing performance will be keeping at the same level. The coordinate effect of boundary spanning and network expansion has a negative effect on supplier’s IT outsourcing performance, which means that the stronger the effect of network expansion, the stronger the negative effect of the coordinate effects towards supplier’s IT outsourcing performance. So the relational network between supplier and client should be keeping at a low state under the cross cultural background.