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Information technology (IT) outsourcing is an interesting alternative for companies that want to obtain certain benefits by delegating IT activities to a provider to keep their focus on their core activities. This outsourcing involves a process that begins with the provider selection, passing through a series of negotiations, and reaching the definition of a contract, which will guide and delimitate the execution of activities, the interaction, and the relationship between the involved parties. To ensure the success of this relationship, several factors under contractual and relational governances have been defined in the literature. This work aims to corroborate the importance of literature findings about contractual aspects and critical success factors by presenting a ranking and correlation analysis and emphasize that companies may use these factors as criteria to improve their outsourcing relationships by developing a partnership status. To meet this objective, we established the main aspects and factors based on the literature, resulting in specific sets. Then, a survey was conducted with outsourcers and providers in the Recife's IT pole (Pernambuco, Brazil) to collect data and determine the relative importance and correlations between the elements of these sets using a methodology based on ranking problems (P.γ) and nonparametrical correlation analysis.

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Purpose Understanding the relational factors in information technology outsourcing (ITO) processes is essential for managers to exercise successful governance over their relationship. Based on this premise, this paper aims to present a study about relational factors using judgments of managers from small and medium-sized supplying and contracting companies involved in ITO relationships, helping to understand the differences between what they believe to be relevant for maintaining the relationships. Design/methodology/approach The analytical approach consisted of applying fuzzy sets theory elements, converting the managers' judgments into crisp values through a defuzzification process, and the multicriteria method ELECTRE IV that created the rankings of the relational factors according to the defuzzified judgments. The approach was applied with 16 managers from supplying companies and 34 from contracting companies, in both cases located in a large Brazilian pole of information technology. Findings The main findings indicate that suppliers are initially more concerned with contractual aspects, being in the highest positions in the ranking: detailed contract, service level agreement and costs. Only after these elements, suppliers prioritize aspects less linked to the contract. For contractors, customer relationship management is the most important, followed by costs and commitment by managers, which indicates more openness to issues-oriented to relational development. Originality/value The approach adopted in this article is differentiated by prioritizing relational factors that are not always directly perceived in ITO relationships. Another important consideration is that most studies focus only on the perspective of supplier selection by contracting companies. In this paper, both suppliers' and contractors' judgments on the importance of ITO relational factors were analyzed, creating rankings that supported understanding the difference between the two perspectives.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a strategic conflict analysis, based on the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR), that is applied to information technology outsourcing (ITO) in a real-world software development and implementation process in Brazil.Design/methodology/approachBecause the idea of this study is to answer “why” the ITO conflicts occur and “how” they can be avoided, the case study methodology was adopted. The software GMCR II was used to analyze the interactions between an IT vendor and an IT client.FindingsThe results suggest that a lack of relational governance is a critical issue that could be handled to improve the interaction between those involved.Research limitations/implicationsThe main results are restricted to the case study and cannot be generalized. Moreover, a specific limitation of this paper pertains to the use of the GMCR and the consequent difficulty for IT vendors and IT clients to work with a large number of actions and to set preferences for several states of conflict.Practical implicationsThe strategic analysis of outsourcing conflicts provides a holistic view of the current situation that may assist the client and vendor in future decisions and identify guidelines to ensure successful ITO. Therefore, this paper provides an effective guide for clients and vendors to better manage conflicts and establish a contingency vision to avoid such disputes.Originality/valueThe ITO conflict is analyzed using the GMCR, considering both perspectives of the outsourcing process (vendors and clients).

This article presents a study that applied opinion analysis about COVID-19 immunization in Brazil. An initial set of 143,615 tweets was collected containing 49,477 pro- and 44,643 anti-vaccination and 49,495 neutral posts. Supervised classifiers (multinomial naïve Bayes, logistic regression, linear support vector machines, random forests, adaptative boosting, and multilayer perceptron) were tested, and multinomial naïve Bayes, which had the best trade-off between overfitting and correctness, was selected to classify a second set containing 221,884 unclassified tweets. A timeline with the classified tweets was constructed, helping to identify dates with peaks in each polarity and search for events that may have caused the peaks, providing methodological assistance in combating sources of misinformation linked to the spread of anti-vaccination opinion.