Information Systems Outsourcing: Enduring Themes, Emergent Patterns and Future Directions

As the information systems (IS) outsourcing trend has gained momentum, it is prudent to stop and reflect on several critical questions: What are the actual intentions of organizations for evaluating and then choosing outsourcing? What problems are these organizations attempting to solve with outsourcing? Do vendors satisfactorily provide solutions to these problems? What are the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing? If an organization decides to outsource, are there strategies which can be employed to assure an effective outsourcing arrangement? What happens if outsourcing does not work for a particular company; can it return to a non-outsourced state and at what cost? How do new sourcing trends, like application service providing, challenge the traditional IS outsourcing life cycle? Questions such as these motivated the conceptual development of this book.