Outsourcing priorities of government functions: Analytic network process approach

Prioritizing some outsourcing functions of government is increasingly considered as a strategic necessity for developing nations. In recent decades, outsourcing management has been one of the main concerns for running public organizations, effectively and efficiently; the more there is citizen satisfaction and fewer costs, the more there will be emergence and expansion of outsourcing. In the complex environment of decision making (opposing criteria and alternatives), we need to utilize multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. Among them, analytic network process (ANP), as the most comprehensive framework of the analysis of public, governmental, and corporate decisions, is able to evaluate complex decision making problems through considering interdependences among criteria and alternatives. Yet, there is no sufficient published works concerning the use of ANP in defining outsourcing priorities of public organizations with typical examples. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to go a step further by applying ANP to solving public problems. This paper also contributes to the common knowledge of outsourcing by providing a new approach to the field. ANP was used for outsourcing decision making as a multi-criteria problem based on four main dimensions of citizen satisfaction, namely; accountability, social justice, effectiveness and efficiency, for the purpose of helping officials to choose the best functions being outsourced in order to improve citizen satisfaction. We have discussed that educational, health, service, productive and cultural activities are the priorities to be outsourced respectively based on experts ideas. Some recommendations for future research are also given.