The vendor firm’s body of knowledge (BoK) has been considered to be vital in IT outsourcing success since outsourcing is considered as flow of knowledge especially from vendor firms to client firms. However, previous researches mostly focused on the client firms’ perspective and less attention on vendor firms and their knowledge bases. In this paper, we investigated the impact of vendor IT firm...

A corporation’s offshore outsourcing may be seen as the result of a discrete, strategic decision taken in response to an increasing pressure from worldwide competition. However, empirical evidence of a representative cross-sector sample of international Danish firms indicates that offshore sourcing in lowcost countries is best described as a learning-by-doing process in which the offshore outso...

The use of outsourcing is expanding rapidly. This chapter empirically tests a model of application development outsourcing acceptance based on the technology acceptance model (TAM). TAM-suggested perceived usefulness and ease of use mediate the effects of other variables on users’ attitudes towards a technology. The model tested in this chapter suggests that perceived usefulness and ease of use...

The global phenomenon of the IS/IT outsourcing continues to grow in importance. IS/IT outsourcing presents business challenges to both outsourcers and vendors alike. While the foundation of IS/IT outsourcing is ostensibly the transfer of financial and structural capital and vendor responsibilities, important issues remain about knowledge transfer and intellectual capital. Effective knowledge tr...

Successful transfer of knowledge between two organizations is of particular importance for outsourcing relationships and even more so for relationships within IT/IS domain where the relationship often needs to be rapidly redefined or terminated. Transferring knowledge in IT/IS outsourcing relationships requires empowering of both teams of outsourcer and service provider towards achieving knowle...

To what extent are structural assumptions veiled in extant outsourcing research? In this paper we suggest a unified view on social ties between individuals in outsourcing relationships. In a comprehensive literature analysis of outsourcing research since 2001, we identified structural assumptions and categorize them based on social network measures. Our analysis uncovers two salient patterns: 1...

This paper presents the findings from an ongoing research study on offshore IT outsourcing. Field work was carried out in India and in the UK to evaluate the scale and scope of outsourcing activities. CEOs and CIOs were interviewed in fifteen supplier firms in India and two customer firms in UK, about strategic positioning in the offshore outsourcing market; benefits and risks from outsourcing;...

By optimizing its outsourcing strategy, a company faces the opportunity to lower the overall costs of its IT project portfolio. Without considering risk and diversification effects appropriately, companies make wrong decisions about how much of a project is reasonable to outsource. In this paper, we elaborate a model to identify a project’s optimal degree of outsourcing at a fixed price, consid...

In the current networked world, outsourcing of information technology or even of entire business processes is often a prominent design alternative. In the general case, outsourcing is the distribution of economically viable activities over a collection of networked organizations. To evaluate outsourcing decision alternatives, we need to make a conceptual model of each of them. However, in an ou...

Since the early 1990's, IT outsourcing has become a popular strategy with contracts valued at billions of Euro, and durations ranging from five to ten years. Stories in the computing and business press together with reports of analyses by consultants highlight that during the lifetime of some contracts, organisations have reconsidered their original decision to outsource. With this rethink, the...