Week – 6 – DQ-2

Introduction

In recent years, outsourcing the information security services has been increasing very fast. The main
reason for this is an economic advantage by outsourcing the IT services. With the rapid evolution of the
communication technology, outsourcing the IT services to other countries made very easy. However,
with the growth, there are some ethical issues involved.

Let’s discuss few of them and how we can ignore these ethical issues.

Ethical Issues in Outsourcing

Cost and Time are the two main factors for selecting Outsourcing models. Since outsourcing the IT
services are focused only on core activities and functions, this considered as the increase the
performance of the business process. Further outsourcing IT services benefits to exclude nonproductive
activities and focus on only the productive activities. This is the main objective of outsourcing the IT
service. However, this process has raised some unethical issues in the business, here are some
examples;

1. Unemployment – Unemployment rate will go up, because of the employment opportunities have
been shifted to another country where the same activities performed with low cost.

2. Poor Quality of service – Poor Qualifies Employees, Language Barriers and Cultural Barriers may lead
to poor quality of services and drop rate of the customer satisfaction. Additionally, Outsourcing the
IT services may also lead to loss of control over the activities that are outsourced and the company
to depend on the outsourced company for the answers.

3. Legal Compliance and Security Concerns – Legal, Compliance and Security issues are more
important. Most of the times the outsourcing provider misused the data. Therefore, data security is
important ethical issue as well as legal and compliance issue.

How Can We Ignore the Ethical Issues that Involved in Outsourcing?

We can ignore the ethical issues involve in Outsourcing by taking the decision for outsourcing activities
we should consider advantages and disadvantages to the company and society. For example, When a
company decided to outsource some of the business and IT activities to some other country, they should
consider not to reduce the employees and consider to move these employees to different activities or as
the current employees are better and have hands of experience for on the job we could use them to
supervise the outsource provider and asses the quality of the service they provided. So with this it will
improve the quality of the service and also the unemployment rate will go down.
Further, company also consider Legal, Compliance and Security issues when taking decision on
outsourcing the business or IT activities. For example: Data Privacy and Data Confidential is the more
important, when making the decision for outsourcing the activities the Company should always assess
the data security controls implemented over the outsourcing provider’s data processing facilities and
made some legal obligation through the contract.

Conclusion

I believe; Outsourcing is very cost effective process from the company side and if we do it in right way
this will also have minimal impact to the society. With this, we can ignore the ethical issues that involve
in the Outsourcing process.

Bibliography

Marty Pine (ND) Outsourcing Pitfalls [Online]. About Money Available from
http://outsourcing.about.com/od/pitfalls/a/The-Pitfalls-Of-Outsourcing.htm (Accessed: 14th September
2014).

Steven M. Mintz (2004) The ethical problems of outsourcing [Online]. Union-Tribune Publishing Co.:
Available from http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040806/news_lz1e6mintz.html (Accessed:
14th September 2014).

Karlis Lucas, Andrejs Pasnevs, Gurubhanskar C, Vishal Verma (2012) Ethical Challenges with Offshoring
[Online]. Riga Business School, Riga LV. Available http://www.slideshare.net/weezkwear/ethical-issues-
of-offshoringoutsourcing (Accessed: 14th September 2014).

Outsource2India (ND) The Ethics of Outsourcing [Online]. Available

http://www.outsource2india.com/why_outsource/articles/ethics_outsourcing.asp (Accessed: 14th
September 2014).

PATRICIA (ND) Advantages And Disadvantages Of Outsourcing [Online]. Available

http://smartchurchmanagement.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-outsourcing/ (Accessed: 14th
September 2014).