Offshoring Research Network - History and Current Objectives

History and Current Objectives

The ORN project was launched in 2004 by the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business. Dr. Arie Y. Lewin, Professor of Strategy and International Business and Director of Duke CIBER, was the initiator and has been the Lead Principal Investigator of the ORN project. The initial idea behind the project was to study the advancing trend of offshoring white-collar work, including administrative and technical tasks, as opposed to blue-collar work, which is mainly associated with manufacturing and which has been practiced for many years. In 2004, the CIBER research team launched the first annual on-line survey of U.S. companies engaged in or considering offshoring administrative and technical tasks. The survey was sponsored by Archstone Consulting. It was conceptualized as an annual survey to track offshoring drivers, risks and concrete implementations over time.

After the second annual survey in 2005, Duke CIBER launched collaborations with European research partners to expand the research initiative into a research network and to facilitate the recruiting of companies for the survey. The third survey in 2006 was sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton and involved data collection from U.S. as well as European firms and public agencies, from Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain. Since then, the project has been further extended and now includes research partners and organizations from Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia and Italy. In 2007, the Conference Board became a lead supporter of the ORN project, and the ORN team launched for the first time a complementary survey of service providers, mainly based in India, China and the United States. In 2009, the ORN survey is being converted to a web-based application with a new benchmarking feature adding value to participating organizations. The findings from the annual research surveys have shifted the focus of ORN research over time. After its initial orientation to offshoring white-collar work, the ORN project has put more emphasis on the global search for talent and offshoring of higher-skilled tasks, in particular product development. Most recently, the ORN project has positioned itself as a research project focusing on studying companies in their transition to globalizing their business functions, processes and administrative services. Offshoring is understood as an intermediary step towards evolving new global organizational capabilities rather than an end in itself.