e-Monitoring of Outsourcing IS Project in Financial Institutions: A Case Study on Mandatory Provident Fund Projects in Hong Kong

In the business world, financial institutions like banks and investment firms heavily rely on technologies to manipulate daily operations and support business activities. Due to limited resources, outsourcing of computer system development and maintenance has become a trend for many years, but many problems still exist during system development. In particular, the inter-dependencies among these artifacts cause integration and reliability problems and make the development process difficult to maintain. In this paper, we propose the e-monitoring of outsourcing projects centered on a central administration server, strengthened by an alert management system (AMS). Remote monitoring agents working in conjunction with outsourced parties, constrained by control rules, (as well as human experts) generate alerts through the AMS when discrepancies are detected. These alerts ensure that problems are detected and overcome in a timely manner. Web services are employed as the underlying implementation infrastructure. We demonstrate our approach (overall and discrepancies monitoring) with a case study on a new project development in a financial institution regarding mandatory provident fund projects in Hong Kong.