Based on over 200 interviews, this new book provides rich insights and practices on the toughest challenges facing offshore client/supplier relationships.  While many client organizations found benefits to be gained from the offshoring of IT work, others struggled to realize any cost savings or other improvements. How can these mixed experiences be reconciled? The research reveals that offshore outsourcing can deliver on its promises, but only if both clients and suppliers diligently manage the details. In this book, the authors provide specific practices that managers can use, and detailed case studies which illustrate how these practices are embedded and enacted within client and supplier firms.

Technology is all too often positioned as the welcome driver of globalization. The popular press neatly packages technology’s influence on globalization with snappy sound bites, such as “any work that can be digitized, will be globally sourced.” Cover stories report Indians doing US tax returns, Moroccans developing software for the French, Filipinos answering UK customer service calls, and the Chinese doing everything for everybody. Most glossy cover stories assume that all globalization is progressive, seamless, intractable, and leads to unmitigated good. But what we are experiencing in the 21st Century in terms of the interrelationships between technology, work and globalization is both profound and highly complex.