The Development And Coordination Of Outsourcing Relationship In ASP Model

Recently, application service providers (ASPs) model has arisen more and more attentions domestically. It provides a new way of information construction for Chinese firms. Thus, It becomes an important issue that how to develop and coordinate the inter-trust partnership between clients and providers in ASP market of china. However, there is not enough research to provide theoretical support for business practice yet. This paper originates exactly from the awareness of the gap between theory study and the urgent calls from practice.Based on the assumption that clients and providers have the willingness to develop a long-term stable partnership, this paper aims to deal with the issue of how to develop and coordinate the relationship, in some extent. Bearing in mind of system thinking and contingency idea and applying multidiscipline perspectives, this research makes full use of questionnaire and interview to study the relevant issues by quantitative and qualitative approach. The analysis focuses on studying the interdependence, opportunism and trust existing in outsourcing relationship after investigating the ASP model and its market. Meanwhile, it explores how to develop a partnership from client's perspective and to coordinate the partnership.The research reaches the conclusions that the development of ASP has been driven by the factors of technology, economic, market and management and there are lots of participants forming the complex structure of ecosystem in ASP market, therefore, the coordination and coevolution is the guarantee for the healthy market ecosystem. Meanwhile, there are lots of risk factors and thus the relevant policies of risk mitigation should be made. Therefore, it's a complicated process to build up and coordinate the outsourcing relationship, which involves in the issues of interdependence, opportunism, trust and coordination mechanism. Among which, inter-trust is the foundation of corporation, and the performance of relationship can be improved by managing appropriately interdependence and by governing effectively opportunistic behavior. Also, the effective coordination mechanism is needed to maintain a stable outsourcing relationship, and it includes the forms and focus of the coordination and the evolution characteristic of coordination mechanism.The general breakthrough of this study is providing a systematical investigation on the development and coordination of outsourcing relationship between clients and providers. The breakthroughs also lies in the detailed parts: it develops a theory framework for ASP research and explores the key factors of successful IT outsourcing after reviewing completely on the theories of IT outsourcing; it applies business ecosystem theory to study ASP, analyzes the risks of ASP based on factors and negative outcome of risks and thus suggests the policies for risk mitigation; it analyses systematically the interdependence, the forms of opportunism between clients and providers, suggests the governance of opportunism and investigates its mechanisms to facilitate inter-trust; it analyses deeply the main determinants of client trusting providers and suggests five ways for providers to develop the trust of clients; it develops an integrative framework for clients of developing the outsourcing relationship with providers, develops an index system of evaluating providers for clients, suggests the detail contents that service level agreement should contain, suggested three basic principles to which ASP contract should comply; it investigates the determinants of selecting coordination forms, suggests five points of coordination and analyzes the relationship of them; finally, it defines five levels of cooperation strength between clients and providers based on the idea of CMM in software engineering, and investigates the evolution characteristics of coordination mechanism based on two dimensions of strength and span of outsourcing relationship.