Professor Deepa Mani

Deepa Mani is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the ISB. She holds a PhD in Information Systems from University of Texas at Austin. She obtained her MS degree in Information Systems from the Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to this Professor Mani completed her PGDMA from University of Mumbai and BA (Honors) in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.

Her research interests lie in organisation and value of outsourcing relationships, impact of IT on firm value and productivity and impact of IT on society.

“An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Information Capabilities Design on Business Process Outsourcing Performance" (co-authored by Anitesh Barua and Andrew Whinston from the University of Texas at Austin is forthcoming in MIS Quarterly, March 2010).

Organisations today outsource diverse business processes to achieve a wide variety of business objectives ranging from reduction of costs to innovation and business transformation. We build on the information processing view of the firm to theorise that performance heterogeneity across business process outsourcing (BPO) exchanges is a function of the design of information capabilities (IC) that fit the unique information requirements (IR) of the exchange. Further, we compare performance effects of the fit between IR and IC across dominant categories of BPO relationships to provide insights into the relative benefits of enacting such fit between the constructs. Empirical tests of our hypothesis using survey data on 127 active BPO relationships find a significant increase (decrease) in satisfaction as a result of the fit (misfit) between IR and IC of the relationship. The results have implications for how BPO relationships must be designed and managed to realise significant performance gains. The study also extends the IPV to identify IC that provide the incentives and means to process information in an inter-firm relationship.