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Business Cost Structure Of Business

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After examining past studies, I picked out the factors that I consider to be most relevant and most determining, and I propose five hypotheses.

H1: Business cost structure is positively correlated with the company’s propensity to outsource its information system.

Business cost structure refers to all the costs directly associated with the actual production and management of the company 's production line. Business cost structure is an important factor of an organization’s profitability; therefore, it is a significant determinant of business competence. Companies seek to produce output below the average cost in order to increase profit margin. In a competitive market, companies are constantly under a lot of pressure (Loh & …show more content…

Most of the prior studies support that the firm size is positively correlated with the probability of outsourcing, and the direct reason is product diversity. One study shows that the relationship is reversed for very large companies. In the study, very large companies are defined as companies with $50 million or more of revenue in a fiscal year. The study shows that there seems to be a positive relationship between the number of products and in-house data processing within very large companies. One of explanation for this is that large companies consider their data processing a strategic issue, which they are not willing to be outsourced. They also have the capability of performing it themselves because they have sufficient scale.

However, in the book Information System Outsourcing, the author found that smaller firms are more likely to outsource. Even the author used sample from a single industry, I think this is a valid perspective. Like I mentioned before, outsourcing may be particularly beneficial to small businesses, which may not be able to afford IT experts or the development of in-house expertise. When such tasks are outsourced, the small business gains access to new technology, which makes it possible for them to compete with larger companies (Ono & Stango, 2005).

Company size can be measured by number of employees or revenue. For the purpose of this paper, I select number

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