A Framework for Offshore Service Providers’ Capability Maturity

Massive growth in offshore IT service delivery in last two decades triggered voluminous amount of research activities in this domain. However, even today research study on offshore providers' capability maturity appears to be sketchy and limited to the concepts of building technology and solution architecting skills. This research study attempts to develop a generic capability maturity framework for offshore IT service providers based on their capabilities pertaining to business processes, service operations, relationship management, and business organization maturity. The research process involves a select group of experts and thought leaders from a global IT service firm in India to capture the ground level experience about the firm's evolution path since its inception. In addition, these experts ascertain various stages of firms' service maturity with the help of a questionnaire based survey followed by theme based interviews. Subsequently, in a group decision making situation, respondents identify the pertinent service capabilities that the firm acquired at various stages of the maturity during its journey of evolution. Successive discussions and review sessions with the experts reveal the significance of identified service capabilities in creating business value at each stage of service maturity. The learnings from these interviews and group sessions helped conceptualize a generic capability maturity framework, which eventually vindicates offshore IT service providers' evolution through a service maturity value chain.