---

Outsourcing means strategic use of other company's resources to accomplish business processes, which can be in the form of outsourcing or offshore outsourcing. One of the important risks of outsourcing projects is selecting an inappropriate contractor. Contractor selection process is very complex because of many and sometimes contradictive criteria. So it needs accurate investigations. The purpose of this research is to design a framework for selecting an appropriate contractor in outsourcing and offshore outsourcing and to specify the weight of each criterion. Method of data gathering is questionnaire which is distributed among internal and external managers and experts. This framework could be helpful for the managers of organizations in contractor selection decision making processes and causes risk reduction in these projects. The results showed that there are twenty important criteria in outsourcing and twenty four criteria in offshore outsourcing; some of them are contractor's innovation, financial stability and cultural adaptation. Keywords: Outsourcing, Offshore outsourcing, Contractor, Criteria, Capability.

---

In recent times issues such as competition, technological complexities, specialization of tasks and cost increases causes organizations to reconsider their managerial models and to turn to new strategies for reaching competitive advantage. Two such strategies are concentration on core capabilities and the transfer of some activities to external organizations (outsourcing). In line with these trends banks in order to give appropriate services to customers, decrease costs, upgrade service quality, improve performance, increase flexibility, gain access to new skills and technologies and focus on key capabilities, outsource some of their activities. Although outsourcing can have advantages for organizations, it has risks which must be effectively managed. The purpose of this research is to identify these risks and investigate their impact on business process outsourcing of banks.  Tejarat bank of Iran was selected as a case study. The data gathering tool of this paper was a questionnaire that was distributed among the experts in the field and managers of Tejarat bank. The results show that among identified risks, strategic risks were rejected and the three risks of financial failure, performance and social-psychological kind were accepted as being valid by experts. It was further identified that performance risks have the highest importance among other risks of business process outsourcing.

---

Managers in developed countries are increasingly interested in outsourcing as a potential source of competitiveness and value creation. One of the most useful outsourcing activities in service sector is information system/technology outsourcing. This paper is trying to determine the ISP managers’ perceived risks and benefits of IT/IS outsourcing and also the rate of awareness about potential of IT/IS outsourcing. Design/methodology/approach - In order to achieve those aims, we first review the previous literature on this topic and later analyze the results of a survey carried out from 30 ISPs managers in Tehran using the structured interview method. Findings: According to the ISPs under analysis, the main advantage of IT outsourcing is reducing/controlling the general cost while the main risk is the excessive dependence on the provider. Nevertheless, some characteristics of the ISPs (e.g. their size and outsourcing level) can determine to some extent what risks and benefits are more relevant. Originality /value: The conclusions explains that total IT/IS outsourcing can turn out to be a very dangerous strategy, mainly due to the dependence it creates. However, it can enable the ISP managers to reduce and/or control the general cost of building a new IT/IS service. The paper investigates the advantages, risks and some dimensions of IT/IS outsourcing decisions in ISPs of Tehran which can potentially develop the services in-house. Therefore, the “make-or-buy” decision for managers of ISPs requires even more attention to these aspects of IT/IS outsourcing (advantages, risks and decision criteria) than other service companies.

---

Secure outsourcing is essential to growth of cloud usage. There are some protocols allowing any functionality to be outsourced. However, specific constructions are necessary in order to do so in an efficient way. In this paper, we consider the problem of secure outsourced pattern matching. Our solution is based on Bit-Parallel Shift-ADD algorithm. The properties of this insecure algorithm allow our construction to search in an outsourced text, without revealing any non-trivial information to the computing server. We achieve a round optimal protocol that allows us to search for patterns with wildcards and handles the Hamming distance computation. Since the protocol has no leakage to the server, it cannot be optimal considering communication complexity; however, we suggest efficient techniques to achieve communication optimality through outsourcing of decryption as well. The security of our protocol is proved in the semi-honest setting. Then, in order to retain the efficiency of the protocol, we omit the correctness property in the malicious setting and prove that the scheme remains private in the presence of malicious adversaries.

---

Nowadays, in most of the organizations such as project-based organizations, outsourcing the projects and transferring the activities are followed by concentrating in core capabilities, reducing size, achieving the best performance, and controlling and transparency of costs. Since each of the outsourcing projects commits the responsibility of performing each part of the project activities to a contractor for a specific period of time and determined costs, this outsourcing process is it self considered as a project. Therefore, despite its numerous advantages, in some situations, it fails, and the most important reason for this failure is lack of using appropriate methods and techniques of management in risk assessment. As a result, the purpose of this paper is presenting a risk assessment model in outsourcing process using the analytic hierarchy process and PROMETHEE methods in fuzzy environment.    

---

  There are too many different reasons for organizational project failures. Non-supportive management, internal resistance, and situational changes can be mentioned as some of the most important reasons. In formation sciences (IS) projects follow the same rules. Because of their considerable effect on the quality and quantity of organizational output, this article tries to propose some solutions to minimize the probability of such failures in Iranian organizations. Informatics Services Corporation (ISC) as the largest e-banking company in Iran has been chosen as the case of study. Vensim software (Version 9) was applied to simulate the real situation available in ISC. By testing different solutions, it was conducted that the most effective ones are: continuous training, establishing sustainable management systems via process clarification and procedure deployment, helping to ameliorate contactors' financial condition, and clear written contractual relations instead of verbal agreements in all phases of the projects. The major advantage of this article is its concentration on project gap.      

---

The high rate of technology changes, lack of equipment, instruments and specificity laboratories, and the low level of skills are the most important problems faced by Iranian R&D managers. R&D outsourcing is one of a new ways of management approaches that has gained particular place in facing these restrictions and defects. Beside all advantages mentioned about outsourcing, it has risks and hazards for organizations too. In other words, the implementation of risk management in R&D outsourcing is an important issue that should not be passovered. Several models have been proposed for risk management that PMBOK is typical one.    In this research, in order to identify and quantitative analysis of R&D outsourcing risks, PMBOK was used, and the main data gathering source was the expert people. By analyzing data of the first questionnaire, the risks of R&D outsourcing were identified, and the risk breakdown structure was proposed based on appropriate category. In the next stage, by analyzing the second questionnaire, tacit knowledge of people and fuzzy systems were used in quantitative analysis of R&D projects’ outsourcing risks.