A Process View of Information Systems Outsourcing Research: Conceptual Gaps and Future Research Directions

With over a decade of research, IS outsourcing seems to mature as an area for IS research. In this paper we use a processbased view to analyze existent IS outsourcing research and identify many issues that still need to be addressed in this area. We classify past outsourcing studies as per their focus on one or more of the seven proposed phases of the outsourcing process. We identify and analyze different theoretical gaps in the current outsourcing literature and propose several specific research questions for each phase to be investigated in future research.