Quantitative modeling of communication cost for global service delivery

IT service providers are increasingly utilizing globally distributed resources to drive down costs, reduce risk through diversification and gain access to a larger talent pool. However, fostering effective collaboration among geographically distributed resources is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we present our initial attempt to quantify the increased overhead in leveraging distributed resources as one of the project costs. We associate this overhead cost measurement with metrics that measure communication quality, such as reduction in productivity and communication delay. These metrics can in turn be computed as functions of underlying project parameters. To achieve this goal, we first build a project communication model (PCM) to categorize different types of collaborative communication. We then represent communication efficiency and changes in resource availability in terms of information theoretic concepts such as reduced channel capacity, information encoding efficiency and channel availability. This analysis is used to help determine the cost associated with team formation and task distribution during the project planning phase. © 2009 IEEE.