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2.5.2 Systems Engineering in an Outsourcing Environment
Author(s) -
Parth Frank R.,
Gumz Joy
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2004.tb00503.x
Subject(s) - outsourcing , order (exchange) , deliverable , business process , process (computing) , work (physics) , quality (philosophy) , computer science , engineering management , business , offshoring , process management , risk analysis (engineering) , engineering , systems engineering , work in process , marketing , mechanical engineering , philosophy , finance , epistemology , operating system
Outsourcing is the process of hiring someone else to do work that a business cannot, or does not wish to, do itself. While businesses have always done this, the entire field of outsourcing has taken on new dimensions and in the past few years has become vastly different from what it once was. Now companies are outsourcing significant portions of their core application development work overseas as well as areas such as order processing, help desks and others, justified by a lower cost per unit. As a result of overseas outsourcing, significant problems have arisen that either did not exist before or were easy to remedy when the work was done internally. Many of these problems can be traced to poor or missing requirements, a poor understanding of business processes, or to technology and security problems in the deliverables. This article discusses the role of systems engineering in avoiding or reducing the most significant problems. Rather than just gathering functional and performance requirements, systems engineers must now develop an entire requirements encyclopedia in order to provide enough information, do much more detailed business process analysis, and help develop testing and quality assurance approaches that can detect security back doors that may have been put into software products.