An empirical investigation of the drivers of software outsourcing decisions in Japanese organizations

Although Japan represents the single largest Asian market and 10% of the global software outsourcing market, little is understood about how Japanese companies make software project outsourcing decisions. Tried-and-tested outsourcing models consistently fail to predict the outsourcing decisions of Japanese companies, leaving global software development companies with little usable guidance in the Japanese outsourcing market. Analyses of 396 software project outsourcing decisions made by 33 IT managers in Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM-Japan, and Mitsubishi provides novel insights into the drivers of Japanese software outsourcing decisions. The objective of this paper is to develop an analytic tool to predict the likelihood of a software project being outsourced by Japanese IT managers.