Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm’s value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. In this paper, capability sourcing modeling is introduced as a techniqu...

As the Information Systems Offshoring and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) phenomena continue to grow and gain popularity, it is becoming increasingly evident that there is a need to consider a combination of the two, that is, Offshore BPO of IS Processes. This paper explores the factors that a multi-national organisation considered when it “offshored” its IS business processes to lower-cost ...

Research summary: This paper studies the coordination burden for firms that pursue variety as their main product strategy. We propose that product variety magnifies the tension between scale economies in production and scope economies in distribution, giving rise to complex sourcing relationships. Sourcing complexity worsens performance and poses a dilemma for organization design: A hierarchica...

Increasingly, software is no longer developed as a single system, but rather as a smart combination of so-called software services. Each of these provides an independent, specific and relatively small piece of functionality, which is typically accessible through the Internet from internal or external service providers. There are no standards or models that describe the sourcing process of these...

Sourcing processes are discussed at a high abstraction level. A dedicated terminology is developed concerning general aspects of sourcing. The term sourcement is coined to denote a building block for sourcing. Notions of allocation, functional architecture and allocational architecture, equilibrium, and configuration are discussed. Limitations of the concept of outsourcing are outlined. This th...

Outsourcing is now a widely accepted part of dong business. What started as a mechanism to lower costs is now an integral part of a much larger IT strategy. Today, newer forms of outsourcing are on the horizon and newer approaches that will change yet again how IT sourcing decisions are made. Better connectivity, the availability of high quality staff, and much lower costs in other countries ar...

Motivated by the recent trend of offshoring manufacturing facilities to seek lower production cost, while keeping some costly local facilities to better respond to changes in market demand, this paper studies a dual sourcing policy and characterizes the average sourcing allocation. We consider the total landed cost from origin (combining a cheap but slow source and a fast but expensive source) ...

This research investigates the knowledge sourcing requirements of teams that implement novel IT projects. It then compares those requirements to the mainstream strategy proffered in the literature for knowledge reuse within project environments. Using a grounded theory approach, this research found that the knowledge sourcing requirements do not align with the mainstream strategy, which is base...

Previous research has identified significant risks involved in IT sourcing, which can undermine business performance. IT governance research has proposed mechanisms to mitigate some of these risks. While this relationship seems evident, it remains unexplored in most IT sourcing research. Our review of IT sourcing articles published in the top three IS journals shows that, only 48% addressed gov...