Research paper of 10 pages "Benefits of Information Technology in the Global Economy"

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The Enabling Role of Information Technology in the Global War for Talent: Accenture’s Industrialized Approach

Erik Beulen Department of Information Systems and Management, Tilburg University, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The globalization of information technology (IT), in which developing countries play a major role, has caused a “war for talent.” To meet challenging growth targets, service providers find that recruitment and retention are of key importance. For developing countries globalization offers the opportunity for economic development. The central question of this paper is how IT can be used to support service providers in these fields. Specifically, this paper focuses on Accenture’s human resources management (HRM) processes and the suite of applications implemented to support them. Accenture’s industrialized approach makes effective and efficient HRM processes possible. The conclusion is that the HRM applications now working in parallel will ultimately converge into a fully integrated application suite. As a result, the exchange of employees between the company’s branches would be still better supported, as would the collaboration between those employees. C© 2008Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: Accenture; human resources management; information technology; offshore outsourc- ing; recruiting; retention

1. INTRODUCTION

The general trend towards globalization is causing pressure on the global labor market. The emerging economies, which are large, have to be integrated into the global market (World Bank, 2007). Service provisioning, too, is globalizing. And the demand for information technology (IT) services, after decades of growth, is still increasing while outsourcing is growing even faster: Gartner and NASSCOM estimate a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 7% up until and including 2010 (Hale & Potter, 2006; NASSCOM, 2007). Interactive Data Corporation (IDC) expected worldwide end users to spend $1.2 trillion on IT in 2006, increasing their IT spending at a CAGR of 6% to reach $1.5 trillion in 2010 (International Data Corporation, 2006).

The increasing global demand for IT services has resulted in a “war for talent.” The BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—are of major and growing importance in the provisioning of IT services (Saxena, 2007). Other Asian, Eastern European, and South

Piet Ribbers and Koen Milis were the accepting Guest Editors for this article.

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American countries are emerging and maturing too (Overby, 2006). IT services talent is in high demand, therefore. Leveraging labor arbitrage is important. But a capability play is going on as well because the developed countries simply do not have enough qualified IT professionals available to keep up with this growth (World Bank, 2007). To meet today’s challenging growth targets, recruitment and retention are of key importance to all service providers (Fisher, Schoenfeldt, & Shaw, 2005; Robertson, 2007).

Developing countries are in a good position to provide highly trained employees, and some two-thirds of all university-educated young professionals indeed come from de- veloping countries (IMD, 2007). This provides a foundation for their home countries’ future development too, and not only because of the demand coming from developed countries (Avgerou, 1998; Batchelor & Scott, 2005; Pohjola, 2001). Developing countries increasingly have access to IT (International Telecommunication Union; Gray, Magpantay, Thompson, de Ridder, & Southwood, 2006), and the investments in these countries by service providers significantly contribute to this development.

In the IT service provider market, two basic types may be distinguished: native service providers (also called multinational corporations) with their head office in a developed country and foreign service providers (also called pure players) with their head office in a developing country (Beulen, Ribbers, & Roos, 2006). Well-known native service providers are companies such as Accenture, CSC, EDS, and IBM (all in the United States), and Logica CMG (in Britain). Most foreign service providers are based in India (Cognizant, HCL, Infosys, Satyam, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro), which shows how dominant the subcontinent is on today’s offshore outsourcing market (Carmel & Tjia, 2005; IDC, 2007). In China, only a few major players such as Worksoft and Neusoft are active alongside the native providers. The same goes for the Eastern European market, where ComputerLand EPAM Luxoft, ProKom, Reksoft, RomInfo, and SoftWin are the only non-local players (Vedala, 2007). Labor market pressure forces native service providers to look for employees in developing countries too. In fact, native service suppliers are growing faster in India than Indian service providers do abroad (Anandaram, 2005). As of September 2007, Accenture India has more employees than Accenture USA (Nelson, 2007). IBM, too, has seen its profits in emerging markets grow again (Murphy, 2007).

Which strategies can service providers apply to successfully emerge talent in the global struggle for talent? Market conform remuneration is one, of course, but “soft” factors such as paying attention to the employees’ non-financial interests and recognizing their personal commitment are important too. Much research has been done in this field by, for example, Kinnie and Staughton (1991), Youndt, Snell, Dean, and Lepak (1996), Aldrich and Langton (1997), Huselid, Jackson, and Schuler (1997), Jayaram, Droge, and Vickery (1999), Kathuria and Partivo (1999), Heneman and Tansky (2002), Peterson (2005), and Erickson and Gratton (2007). The research for this article focuses on the contribution that IT might deliver towards finding and keeping global talent.

Human resources (HR) technology may be defined as “any technology that is used to attract, hire, retain, and maintain talent, support workforce administration, and optimize workforce management” (Shrivastava & Shaw, 2003, p. 202). It contributes to the HR department’s flexibility, cost effectiveness, and customer focus (Snell, Stueber, & Lepak, 2002). Specifically, this article focuses on the functionality of the HR information system (HRIS) implemented by Accenture in developing countries. An HRIS may be defined as “the system used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve, and distribute pertinent information regarding an organization’s human resources (Tannenbaum, 1990, p. 27). In the current state of affairs, most computerization in HR is used to support administrative

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processes. But new functionalities are marketed constantly to support talent management, workforce management, service delivery, and workforce analysis and decision (Holincheck, Brown, & Woods, 2007). This article elaborates not only the “functioning” dimension by describing the core HR processes and the supporting role played by information technology but also the “performance” dimension too by focusing on HRM goals and challenges and HRM application suite objectives.

To carry out the research for this article, 16 HR executives from Accenture were inter- viewed in July and August 2007. These executives work for the company’s branches located in the Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Latvia, and Slovakia, which means that each of the three emerging continents is included with two representative countries. The appropriate research method was to generate an “exploratory-descriptive” case study (Yin, 2003). This enables one to elicit data and information from informants with the purpose of building a new theory rather than testing a particular theory that already exists (Myers & Avison, 2002). The interviews took an hour and a half each and were taped and fully transcripted. In addition, information available in the public domain was included, such as annual reports and newspaper clippings.

All interviewees have HR responsibilities and much experience working for both Ac- centure and other companies. In the interviews, open questions were used to investigate how IT supports their HR work and how it contributes to their efforts in the global war for talent. The interview transcripts were read and reread to identify the enabling role of IT in this field by capturing the ideas and phenomena described by interviewees. Data analysis was conducted in three stages: preliminary analysis, formal analysis, and final data analysis (Rubin & Rubin, 1995, p. 226). Of these, the preliminary analysis was al- ready carried out during the interviews. Afterward, the information obtained was subjected to an interpretative analysis in order to structure it so that it would match the research question. This meant coupling theoretical concepts with the empirical data collected. The consolidated conclusions of all sixteen interviews were then used as input for the final data analysis, as detailed in this article. This involved an iterative process that relied on the use of “descriptive, interpretative and pattern” codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 57).

Accenture itself is a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, with net revenues of USD 19.7 billion for the 2006–2007 fiscal year. It may be characterized as a network organization of which the component parts collaborate in ever- changing combinations to deliver services to a great number of international clients. It is committed to delivering services to businesses and governments and employs more than 175,000 people in 49 countries. The capabilities required differ widely between the company’s divisions, especially between management consulting and technology services. This, of course, has consequences for the functionalities required of its HRIS, and these will be discussed here too.

The labor markets in all countries investigated may be characterized as tight, and salaries are increasing rapidly. The worldwide average annual growth of domestic product (GDP) was 4.2% in the 1997–2007 period; in 2007, it even amounted to 5.2% (United Nations, 2007). Worldwide average unemployment was 6.0% (Johnson, 2008). In Asia, much at- tention is drawn to the management of external and internal (rural to urban) migration. Many service providers set up dependencies in new locations in India and China, among other things, to prevent people from having to migrate to other parts of their country. An- other effect of having more subsidiaries is that it distributes the increasing wealth more evenly over the country (Asian Development Bank, 2007). The opening up of the European Union’s borders renders it easier for IT professionals from countries such as Latvia and

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TABLE 1. The Interviewees

# Role Level Date of interview Geography

1. Country HR manager Executive August 7, 2007 Brazil 2. General HR manager Executive July 19, 2007 India 3. General HR manager Executive August 7, 2007 Brazil 4. Recruiting manager Manager July 20, 2007 Latvia 5. Country HR manager Executive August 7, 2007 Slovakia 6. General HR manager Executive July 25, 2007 China 7. Recruiting manager Manager August 1, 2007 China 8. Recruiting manager Manager August 2, 2007 Argentina 9. General HR manager Executive July 27, 2007 India 10. Country HR manager Executive July 20, 2007 Latvia 11. General HR manager Executive July 20, 2007 Argentina 12. General HR manager Manager August 3, 2007 Argentina 13. General HR manager Executive August 14, 2007 India 14. Recruiting manager Manager August 1, 2007 China 15. General HR manager Manager July 31, 2007 China 16. General HR manager Executive August 1, 2007 China

Slovakia to settle there. Immigration, however, puts pressure on the labor markets in their home countries. In Argentina and Brazil, education enrollment rates improve as well as the education systems themselves (Johnson, 2008). The IT industry may profit from these developments.

2. HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Human resources management (HRM) may be defined as “a set of distinct but interrelated activities, functions, and processes that are directed at attracting, developing, and main- taining (or disposing of) a firm’s human resources” (Lado & Wilson, 1994, p. 701). HRM includes the following areas: recruitment and selection, education and training, compen- sation and benefits, performance management, talent management, and administration and payroll (Fisher et al., 2005). In many companies, the coordination of human resources allo- cation and task scheduling is important too; it is called the scheduling process (Deschner, Hofmann, & Bodendorf, 2000).

Accenture’s HRM department has set itself three main goals: (a) energizing, educating, and inspiring their people; (b) delivering the right talent and capabilities to meet the needs of the business; and (c) running HR as a high-performance team. As Accenture has always been a global company, standardizing their processes—including those for HR—has also always been one of its priorities.

Apart from these goals, Accenture currently faces five challenges in the field of HRM. The first is the management diversity that is caused by the fact that the company is active in such different areas as management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing. Management consultants usually work on several concurrent projects with relatively short execution times, and they often experience a quicker personal development than do IT professionals in technology services and outsourcing. HRM must accommodate these differences somehow. The next challenge is the realization of Accenture’s growth targets, which means that new employees must be recruited and current employees must be retained. These two challenges are related to the HRM department’s first two main goals (energizing, educating, and inspiring and delivering talent and capabilities).

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TABLE 2. Relations Between Accenture’s HRM Challenges and its Main HRM Goals

Main HRM goals

Delivering the right Energizing, talent and capabilities Running HR as a

educating, and to meet the needs high-performance HRM challenges inspiring our people of the business team

1. Management diversity √ √

2. Growth targets √ √

3. Multiple country sourcing requirements

√

4. Increasing HR support efficiency

√

5. Increasing of HR support effectiveness

√ √

Especially in technology services and outsourcing, teams must be assembled from differ- ent countries and sometimes even from different divisions. The HR managers of the coun- tries involved must make this work smoothly. This represents the third challenge, which is connected with the second of the three main goals (delivering talent and capabilities).

Challenges number four and five, concerning (see Table 2), the efficiency and effective- ness of the company’s HR support, are closely related. Professionals need HR support to be effective, and their communications with HRM and the support they receive must run smoothly; for the business and HRM, it is important that this is done cost-effectively too. The results will be an improved competitive position and that more of the budget becomes available for other activities. These last two challenges are related to the goal of running a high-performance team; the one concerning effectivity connects with the energizing, educating, and inspiring goal as well.

3. THE CHALLENGE OF SUPPORTING HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

The role HRISs play in supporting HRM steadily increases (Hagood & Friedman, 2002; Mayfield, Mayfield, & Lunce, 2003; Hussain, Wallace, & Cornelius, 2007). It is especially the potential that such systems have for exchanging information within the organization that renders them so attractive (Pfeffer, 1998; Hussain et al., 2007). Consequently, investments in HRIS application are growing (Shrivastava & Shaw, 2003; AMR, 2007). These invest- ments should result in cost reduction, high service quality, and cultural change (Yeung & Brockbank, 1995; Echols, 2005), which matches the goals that Accenture’s HR department has set for itself. Nevertheless, not all HRIS investments are made as good as they should be (Lepak, Taylor, Tekleab, Marrone, & Cohen, 2007).

An important question is, how do Accenture’s HRM challenges influence its HRIS? The interviews held for this research showed that the company’s diversity makes it difficult to find a way to service everyone equally well. Management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing all need support but of very different kinds. We have already discussed some of the differences between management consulting, on the one hand, and technology ser- vices and outsourcing, on the other. But there is more. For one, the latter two lines of business

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are run from Accenture locations as well as the services involved. This means that the total staff size of the teams working in these lines of business must be estimated a long time ahead so as to be able to provide sufficient accommodation for them. Management consulting, by contrast, mostly operates on the clients’ premises. They need much less in-house office space. Another difference is that staff for technology services and outsourcing projects is hired only if the contracts for those projects have already been signed, whereas management consultants are hired first and only then allocated to projects. This is a consequence of their different personal profiles, and it implies that the business model for their lines of business are entirely different too. Third, management consultants are rewarded differently from their colleagues in technology services and outsourcing. Integrating the long-term bonuses paid to technology services and outsourcing staff with their regular pay needs much attention. Their compensations and benefits must be kept on a market-conform level and are there- fore rather variable. Finally, there is the difference in the extent to which the professionals themselves are involved in the scheduling process. Management consultants are very active in the scheduling process; in fact, they do most of it themselves. But in technology services and outsourcing this is less desirable because nobody would then be doing the less popular jobs such as application maintenance. Their schedules are therefore set up for them by business and HR managers who must of course balance maintenance jobs with the more in- teresting projects. All these differences imply that the company’s HRIS faces some serious demands.

The growth targets that Accenture has set itself imply that the HRIS must be robust. The Accenture HRIS handles enormous amounts of data on staff, recruiting, and the projects involved. This holds for the applications as well as the underlying hardware and databases. The HRIS must perform well and much effort is needed to keep it that way too.

The multiple country sourcing requirement means that HR information must be ex- changed between countries, and it is the HRIS that must provide this functionality. Because multiple sourcing is closely related to scheduling, the most important information in this respect concerns the commitments made, the dates when professionals will become avail- able again, and their résumés. But reviewing information on a supra-national level is also needed for good performance management. And if in the future the demand for ad hoc HR management reports continues to grow, such information must be available from a central point and in a standard format.

Increasing HR support efficiency is achieved by implementing manager self-service functionality. Business managers have direct access to recruiting, scheduling, and perfor- mance applications, enabling them to carry out their work quickly and when they need to. Because the information transfer about these aspects between business managers is kept to a minimum, so are mistakes. Fewer HR staff are needed then. Specialized HR administration centers have been set up to support both business and HR managers. These centers are especially good at answering complex questions about matters within their geographical area. They bundle expertise, rendering the whole process more efficient and effective.

In order to increase HR support effectiveness still further, the company’s employees too can use these self-service portals. because all Accenture employees do most of their work with computers and therefore have access to the Internet, this works well. All staff enter their time registration and expenses data directly on line. And the business and project managers’ performance management system, used to assess employees in comparison with targets agreed beforehand, is accessible via portals as well.

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4. ACCENTURE’S HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT APPLICATION SUITE

Accenture has developed and implemented applications for all important HR tasks. The HR executives and managers interviewed for this research provide the following overview of the situation. Much hard work has been invested in improving Accenture’s HR application suite during the past few years and the interviewees showed themselves satisfied with the functionality now available. The individual applications might still be better integrated into the system as a whole but this can perhaps be done in future releases.

The applications used have been implemented worldwide now. Local legacy applications were replaced, as was the globally used Lotus Notes performance management application. The result has been a thorough standardization and integration of the suite. Nevertheless the outsourcing division, with Accenture India in the lead, has taken parallel initiatives to increase the match among the functionality of the recruitment and selection, scheduling applications, and the division’s information needs. Only a few major countries in the division (such as India, China, and the Philippines) use this functionality; other countries, who are smaller in outsourcing staff, still use Accenture’s worldwide standard application. This difference is partly due to the relatively larger management consulting presence in these smaller country organizations, which causes a different internal power balance in, for example, India, China, and the Philippines. Such local solutions run counter to Accenture’s corporate HR and IS strategies, of course, in which standardization and integration are the central tenets, including the HRIS. With respect to the HRM application suite, corporate HR’s objectives are as follows: (a) implementing best practice processes and tools with a focus on talent supply chain management, performance management, and compensation; and (b) setting up effective shared services teams and delivering on shared services network commitments. These objectives of the HRM application suite must ensure that Accenture realizes its HR challenges (Table 2). For the future, Accenture will therefore have to weigh the necessity of local or divisional customization against the obviously important need to use uniform systems.

Let us look in some detail at the individual applications in Accenture’s HRM application suite. To begin with, the global tools. For education and training, MyLearning has been implemented worldwide. This portal contains a great number of online training courses, from technical training for specific software to strategic business development in any of the company’s branches. Using this portal, employees can sign up for classroom training sessions on almost any number of subjects. Naturally, the tool keeps track of who has taken which training, right from the beginning of their contract with Accenture. It also ensures that professionals only take training courses for which they have the right knowledge and experience. Approval is in the hands of their line and HR managers who receive a notification when someone signs up. After their OK, the system confirms that the employee can participate and subtracts the course costs from their training budget.

MyPerformance is the application for performance and talent management implemented a few years ago to replace a Lotus Notes database. MyPerformance is a portal, just like MyLearning, and it is used by both professionals and business and HR managers. Before a professional begins work on an assignment, he or she and the business manager involved formulate the performance criteria. The professional’s actual performance is then regularly reviewed by the two of them, and the resulting assessments are stored in MyPerformance. These assessments are used by the business and HR managers in their yearly discussion of the professional’s career development. The final assessment that is the result is stored

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into MyPerformance too. Essentially, MyPerformance couples engagement targets with the objectives of the professionals.

For compensation and benefits, a portal was set up too: Celebrating Performance. This allows business managers to reward professionals extra. The budget available to do so depends on their position within the organization. The stocks held by Accenture employees are registered in MyHoldings, which also allows them to conduct transactions. Likewise, Accenture’s worldwide HR administration and payroll is monitored and executed using SAP products. Of the countries investigated, only Argentina, Brazil, and China take care of payroll themselves. In the company’s other country branches, this is carried out by an external partner, who uses the data in the SAP application to pay the employees their salaries.

MyScheduling is a portal storing everyone’s résumés and information on the trainings they have had. Employees are responsible for keeping their own résumés up to date. MyScheduling’s most important functionality is matching the supply and demand for professionals. It keeps track of who is working where and until when. When new projects must be staffed, this portal shows when they will be available again. The new projects are then added to those already stored in the portal, thus facilitating the allocation of staff to the assignments.

The recruitment and selection application is called the Accenture Talent Acquisition System (ATAS), a workflow-based application. It has been integrated with SAP, and data on newly recruited staff is stored in it. In the past, a Microsoft Sharepoint solution was used, but ATAS’ extensive functionality allows greater efficiency. Effectiveness has improved too because Accenture is now much better able to analyze the recruitment process and provide HR and business managers with a better basis for their decisions. The supply of potential candidates can thus be matched with the demand for them.

In India, China, and the Philippines, ABACUS is used next to ATAS and MyScheduling. It is an application developed especially for the outsourcing division, and it supports recruitment and selection as well as scheduling. For recruitment and selection, like in ATAS,

TABLE 3. HRM Activities and the Functionalities of the Accenture HRM Application Suite

Accenture HRM application suite

MySched- MyLearn- MyPerfor- Celebrating MyHold- HRM activities ATAS uling ing mance Performance ings SAP ABACUS

Recruitment & selection

√ √

Scheduling √ √

Education & training

√

Performance management & talent management

√

Compensation & benefits

√ √ √

HR administra- tion & payroll

√

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there is an SAP interface. This tool is especially capable of processing large numbers of résumés of which Accenture India alone receives a staggering 40,000–50,000 per month. With respect to recruitment and selection, the application’s functionality differs very little from that of ATAS; it is mostly the enormous volume processed that made it necessary. But scheduling works differently from ATAS, which is necessary considering this division’s different requirements.

5. LESSONS LEARNED

Because Accenture has always elected to standardize its HR processes, there was a ba- sis for replacing the (admittedly standardized) legacy applications, like Lotus Notes for performance management and Microsoft Sharepoint for recruiting; global portal applica- tions have come in their stead. These final steps have transformed the entire Accenture HRM application suite into an integrated self-service portal for both managers and pro- fessionals. Centralizing support for business and HR managers into regional HR centers further increases effectiveness and efficiency, as does the standardization and innovation of the applications involved. This straightforward strategic move has brought about a greatly improved HRM application suite.

Market dynamics left Accenture India no choice but to develop and implement their own HR application in order to cover the information needs for their outsourcing division. But the question remains whether there is good rationale for keeping the ABACUS application. Power plays a role in these matters, of course. Corporate HR and IS strategists have dif- ficulty accepting ABACUS, but considering its enormous numbers of employees and its turnover, Accenture India has significant clout. The hard facts show that more than 50% of Accenture’s worldwide turnover is made in technology services and outsourcing. That means that a specific solution for their requirements can well be justified. In fact, these business lines and management consulting are large enough to justify having independent HR application suites. But is this effective and efficient in the longer term too? Accenture might choose to migrate all its HR activities in the technology services and outsourcing field to ABACUS, leaving the present suite to the management consultants. But clients increasingly look for service suppliers who not only execute their maintenance for them but also tackle their innovation needs too so that management consultants will increasingly be involved in technology services and outsourcing projects. That would mean that splitting up the HRM application suite is not such a good idea. So should ABACUS be rolled out across the entire Accenture organization worldwide? This would be a major operation because most countries now do not use ABACUS for their recruiting and scheduling tasks. But its functionalities would improve the match with the needs of the outsourcing division in other national branches too. However, what would then be the consequences for management consulting? For them, a vanilla implementation seems the best solution. It would keep the HRM application suite usable for that division too, resulting in a globally integrated suite. And such a process would be in agreement with the incremental software implementation process as described by Fichman and Moses (1999). They believe that “organizational learn- ing maintains implementation focus and momentum, and negates the common tendency to over-engineer technology solutions” (p. 39). In other words, implementing ABACUS as well as MyScheduling and MyPerformance simply was a necessary stepping stone to the final solution.

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6. CONCLUSIONS

This article summarizes recent efforts by Accenture to continuously improve their HRIS in order to remain successful in the global war for talent. One of the company’s striking aspects is its diversity due to the differences between its management consulting, technology services and outsourcing divisions. This influences its HRIS requirements, of course, as does the company’s size and ambitions. Accenture’s HRIS must further meet the demands resulting from its work for its clients: To service international clients, the company must match its internal demand and supply across national boundaries. Finally, there is a notable emphasis on employee and manager self-service functionality. This works very well because the vast majority of the company’s employees is college or university schooled. Both employees and managers can use the HR portal at any time that suits them, and they are then fully supported with working capacity and information.

Accenture’s effort is a long-term, ongoing strategic process and their objectives are clear. But in practice, things are not always so straightforward. To be able to support the company’s growth targets, the outsourcing division had to divert from the overall route towards HRIS standardization and integration. Their information needs really presented one of those “architecturally significant requirements’ that have been defined as ‘a requirement upon a software system which influences its architecture” (Obbink et al., 2002, p. 10). Only the future will tell whether the outsourcing division will ultimately implement the applications that are best for them, necessitating a vanilla implementation for the other division. This choice involves making a strategic decision on both the corporate HR and the IS levels, and it will require the commitment of all HRM application suite users.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Accenture and the interviewees for the opportunity to conduct this research and for providing me with valuable insights into Accenture’s human resources management processes and application suite. The efforts and many helpful comments from the editors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers are greatly appreciated as well.

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Erik Beulen is employed at Tilburg University in the Netherlands as an assistant professor and by Accenture as a senior manager. He obtained his Ph.D. from Tilburg University. His papers have been published in journals such as the European Management Journal and Communications Association for Information Systems and the proceedings of the HICSS and ICIS. Beulen has contributed chapters in editorial books by Erran Carmel, Wendy Currie, Suzanne Rivard and Benoit Aubert, and Wim van Grembergen. He is the author and co-author of various Dutch-language books on the subject of outsourcing and offshore outsourcing. Beulen also is co-author of the book Managing IT Outsourcing, published by Routledge, UK.

Information Technology for Development DOI: 10.1002/itdj