A Study Of IT Outsourcing And Its Risk Management In Higher Education Informatization

Higher Education Informatization which is the main part of national EducationInformatization has been paid more and more attention by government in recent years.Since started nearly from the1990’s, it has now made remarkable achievements in thebuilding of infrastructure, digital resource, information systems, norms, informationmanagement and IT maintenance. And in this process, IT outsourcing complements theinsufficient IT abilities of higher education. IT companies have contributed a lot in theDigital Campus construction wave from the recent ten years, and their importance is nownoticed and emphasized more deeply by higher education institutions.In fact, after Kodak outsourced its whole IT department in1989, lots of companies andgovernments began to outsource their IT business, but many of them are not so successfulor even failed. In order to help people to make scientific and rational IT outsourcingdecisions and avoid risks many scholars have done a lot of researches on IT outsourcing.But very few of them focus on IT outsourcing in higher education.This paper firstly reviews the IT outsourcing research, especially in higher education.After introducing some common concepts of IT outsourcing, it then uses the SWOTmethod to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of IT outsourcing inhigher education. And it puts forward the strategy for IT outsourcing in high educationbased on the analysis from the perspectives of finance, technology and strategy. The paperproposes an IT outsourcing risk management model referencing the existed riskmanagement frameworks. The model identifies the risk factors from every phase of theoutsourcing process. And it proposes that higher education should adopt IT governance,build IT outsourcing management mechanism, make decisions for IT requirementscomprehensively, choose IT companies scientifically, and appoint a team whose memberscome from related departments to manage the outsourcing project, cooperate with andsupervise the employees from IT companies. But after higher education institutionsoutsource their IT, they still need certain IT abilities to manage IT outsourcing. Theyshould train employees to obtain those IT abilities.In the end, this paper takes Shanghai International Studies University where theauthor has been worked for5years as an example to discuss the problems of its IT outsourcing, and provides some advice and solutions.There are3innovation points in this paper.1) It offers a model for higher educationIT outsourcing;2) It has analyzed the situation of higher education IT outsourcing usingSWOT method;3) It introduces IT governance to manage the risks of IT outsourcing inhigher education.