Studying and Prioritizing Risk Factors of Outsourcing in IT Projects (Case Study: Economical and Financial Affairs Organization of Golestan Province)

Outsourcing IT projects have advantages such as: reducing expenses, service quality improvement, creating competitive profits, etc. Ignoring risks when outsourcing these projects will lead to failure in realization of anticipated benefits and consequently to the failure of the project. With regards to expanding trend of outsourcing IT projects in Iran, the purpose of this study is to identify outsourcing risks of IT projects and then prioritizing them by using viewpoints of information systems developing experts. To this end, a list of eleven risk factors was identified by reviewing key articles. An analytic network process (ANP) structure was prepared in order to prioritize them, and risk factors were applied. Then, viewpoints of twelve experts were collected in this regard, by a questionnaire. Results of this study indicated that uncertainty factor as a well as a sub-factor of lacking provider’s skill in IT operation hold the most significant priority in success or failure in outsourcing of IT projects from the points of views of IT systems designing experts.