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As a result of IT outsourcing and offshoring, IT professionals and educators are faced with the following question: What SE & KE skill sets will make a software engineer or a knowledge engineer immune to the impact of outsourcing and offshoring? This article summarizes the position papers from a panel held during the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering from July 5 to 7 at the Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City in California, USA. Bringing software and knowledge engineers closer to the needs of their prospective customers and providing more value than simply pure software development and maintenance, is an open challenge at least for traditional computer science and software engineering curricula.

The outsourcing market has been growing in recent years and it is expected to keep doing so in the coming years, but this growth has been limited by the failure of many projects that, in some cases, has led organizations to take back those services (insourcing). These failures have been due mainly to problems with providers: lack of experience and capacity to take on the projects, and difficulties of communication. There are good practices frameworks for managing outsourcing projects for clients, but it is not the same for providers, who base the provision of services on their past experience and technical capabilities. The aim of this paper is to state the need of proposing a methodology that guides providers throughout the whole outsourcing life cycle and facilitates the provision of quality services and their management.

This article investigates the market reaction to a sample of announcements of business service outsourcing arrangements made by UK quoted companies between 1991 and 1997. Event study methodology is applied to daily stock returns to measure the reaction, in the form of excess returns, immediately prior to and at the date of an outsourcing contract announcement. The conclusion is that initial announcements tend to enjoy positive and significant reaction and that the larger companies in the sample show a more positive reaction than smaller companies. Overall outsourcing announcements appear to be associated with excess returns but the absence of any recognized basis for disclosure prevents a complete analysis of such events.

In this paper from the Xiangshang Forum 2006, we propose the Wisdom project, an international network initiative on developing the next generation of management and entrepreneurial systems based on knowledge and wisdom rather than data and information. This is a major challenge especially for China which must aspire to become wise and ethical rather than just efficient or effective. Major topics of the project include knowledge management, wisdom systems, added value measures, entrepreneurial university, and management as a profession. These topics are the key ones for developing sustainable competitive advantage of any globally aspiring economy or enterprise.

The practice of solely relying on the human resources department in the selection process of external training providers has cast doubts and mistrust across other departments as to how trainers are sourced. There are no measurable criteria used by human resource personnel, since most decisions are based on intuitive experience and subjective market knowledge. The present problem focuses on outsourcing of private training programs that are partly government funded, which has been facing accountability challenges. Due to the unavailability of a scientific decision-making approach in this context, a 12-step algorithm is proposed and tested in a Japanese multinational company. The model allows the decision makers to revise their criteria expectations, in turn witnessing the change of the training providers' quota distribution. Finally, this multi-objective sensitivity analysis provides a forward-looking approach to training needs planning and aids decision makers in their sourcing strategy.

With lower operational costs, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) trade via e-commerce, but without the abilities to develop the expensive payment system. Therefore, a cash flow service provider plays critical roles to complete the online transactions. A cash flow service provider must precisely predict those outsourcing customers to serve the customers well under the correctly prepared facilities. Since the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) have demonstrated prediction efficiency for fuzzy circumstances in many fields, this study attempts to innovate deploying the ANFIS model on the time series predictions for e-commerce cash flow service customers. Moreover, this study takes an e-commerce cash flow service provider in Taiwan for numerical analysis. For the ANFIS predictions, an acceptable prediction error rate of 5.6% is achieved. The results show that fashion industry tops the highest customers share for outsourcing the cash flow services; and the credit cards top the highest share in the payment media choices.

In today’s financial services landscape, staying ahead of the innovation curve and being disciplined at enhancing core service offerings entail careful resource planning. A well-structured outsourcing arrangement can go a long way towards enhancing long term organizational strategic growth. In the post-2014 FinTech era, (i) strategic management with an innovation focus; and (ii) financial technology-associated risks, have brought about changes to outsourcing in the financial services industry. Presently, most outsourcing life cycle models in existing literature seek to provide comprehensive, yet industry-neutral guidelines lacking industry context and depth of coverage. A newly licensed financial institution deciding to embark on outsourcing but is uncertain about how to thread the increasingly complex FinTech and financial regulatory landscape, will likely find domain-specific outsourcing life cycle models useful. A more targeted financial services outsourcing life cycle approach, with a focus on strategy and risk management in today’s context, can contribute more effectively to the application and review of outsourcing implementation. This chapter discusses a new Strategy-Risk outsourcing life cycle model. This is an elegant and simple-to-use end-to-end framework which can be utilized by the financial services industry to guide outsourcing decisions. The chapter also recommends areas for future research.