Vendor availability: a key factor for outsourcing in Chilean ICT sector

Currently, in various reports, Chile has been receiving better rankings than other Latin American countries, identifying it as a nation for offshoring many of the business process outsourcing (BPO) and information and communication technology (ICT)‐related services. So, it has become important to analyze the Chilean ICT sector and the maturity of the outsourcing industry internally, to consider Chile as an ICT outsourcing destination. This paper seeks to address this matter.

A survey questionnaire is developed based on the ICT outsourcing literature, prior empirical research and outsourcing case studies. This questionnaire is translated into Spanish and distributed to CIOs of the 200 largest companies in Chile. The responses from the CIOs are used as the proxy measures and are analyzed for evaluation.

This study is conducted to understand and analyze the strategy adopted by Chilean companies to evaluate the need for ICT outsourcing. Also, the outsourcing capabilities and productively leveraging the built‐up local ICT capability are analyzed. The results of the study show that the vendor availability and contractibility are considered very important relative to a clear understanding of internal ICT cost structures in Chilean industry.

Although the responses give a general sense to guide the researcher in the right direction, the low‐response rate to the survey hampered the study in obtaining robust results.

The study shows that Chilean CIOs are clearly familiar with outsourcing evaluation issues but lack environmental support in terms of legal and business tools and mechanics to build a stronger ICT industry.

This paper is one of very few research studies that have been conducted on Chile.