MEASURING USER SATISFACTION IN AN OUTSOURCING ENVIRONMENT

Outsourcing is a term that encompasses a variety of approaches to cont racting for information technology (IT) services, It is defined as a t ransfer of any particular IT activity or a combination of activities f rom an organization using them to one or more external service provide rs. IT outsourcing leads to significant changes in the management proc esses of the IT organization, For example, while IT managers have alwa ys had the responsibility for ensuring that users within their organiz ation maintain a high degree of satisfaction, they now have to monitor the quality of service, even though they are no longer the providers of the service, This gets complicated further when only some parts of the IT functions are outsourced while others are provided by an intern al IT department, Thus, developing a comprehensive set of measurement tools and mechanisms is an important step toward monitoring the qualit y of service provided by both an outside source and an IT department. This paper investigates the usefulness of an existing user-satisfactio n measurement instrument for identifying problem areas in a multiprovi der outsourcing environment, where an external service provider and an internal IT department each has different roles in the system, It dis cusses the rationale for measuring user satisfaction and the instrumen ts to carry out the measurement procedure, It reports the results of i mplementing and testing a previously developed, documented, and valida ted user-satisfaction instrument in an outsourcing environment and dra ws practical conclusions from the results.