A review of the IT outsourcing literature: Insights for practice

By Mary C. Lacity, Shaji Khan, Leslie P. Willcocks. Journal of strategic information systems, 2009

747 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews research studies of information technology outsourcing (ITO) practice and provides substantial evidence that researchers have meaningfully and significantly addressed the call for academics to produce knowledge relevant to practitioners. Based on a review of 191 IT outsourcing articles, we extract the insights for practice on six key ITO topics relevant to practitioners. The first three topics relate to the early 1990s focus on determinants of IT outsourcing, IT outsourcing strategy, and mitigating IT outsourcing risks. A focus on best practices and client and supplier capabilities developed from the mid-1990s and is traced through to the late 2000s, while relationship management is shown to be a perennial and challenging issue throughout the nearly 20years under study. More recently studies have developed around offshore outsourcing, business process outsourcing and the rise, decline and resurrection of application service provision. The paper concludes by pointing to future challenges and developments.

Subfields: Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d46f18c2a69cb4058a3e83197c020413809595ed

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Citations in the corpus

A review of the IT outsourcing empirical literature and future research directions (2010, methodology): “Lacity et al .”
Opportunities and risks of software-as-a-service: Findings from a survey of IT executives (2011, background): “Finally, quality improvements are also a frequently cited reason why firms choose to outsource their applications [45].”
A critical review of cloud computing: researching desires and realities (2012, background): “Cost-savings and the desire to focus on core capabilities are also the most frequent motivations for traditional outsourcing (Lacity et al ., 2009) yet there is growing recognition that there are risks associated with focussing solely on questions of cost.”
Integrative framework for assessing firms' potential to undertake Green IT initiatives via virtualization - A theoretical perspective (2011, background): “A comprehensive literature review by Lacity et al. (2009) implies that, at the organizational level, top management support in IT outsourcing initiatives can impact the overall project success.”
Computing (2021, methodology): “We used an Empatica E4 [Ollander et al. 2016] that measures heart rate (HR), electrodermal activity (EDA), accelerometer, skin temperature, and blood volume/blood pulse.”