Leslie P. Willcocks

A review of the IT outsourcing literature: Insights for practice

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.

Exploring information technology outsourcing relationships : theory and practice

Abstract A growing concern among the organisations who are actively involved in Information Technology outsourcing is post-contract management and the ensuing development of what many practitioners and scholars have coined the ‘outsourcing partnership’. This paper integrates theoretical concepts from organisation theory, social exchange theory, and relational contract theory with existing research on IT outsourcing, to develop a conceptual model for understanding the relationship. In particular, we conceptually elaborate and then address the relationships properties — identified as interactions, contract, context, structure, and behavioural dimensions. Preliminary exploratory research into relationship practice in twelve organisations involved in outsourcing presents some interesting findings that advance the thinking about the outsourcing relationship. We found the conceptual model useful in elucidating important relationship management areas, highlighting not only the outsourcing relationships contractual, social, and economic characteristics, but also many additional elements found to have relevance in practice.

Exploring relationships in information technology outsourcing: The interaction approach

Information technology (IT) outsourcing ventures have been termed successful or less successful in achieving their expected outsourcing objectives according to the operational effectiveness of the ensuing client–upplier relationship. Yet researchers and practitioners share no consistent understanding of the actual operational characteristics of these IT outsourcing relationships. The paper bridges this gap by adopting the International Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) groups dyadic ‘interaction Approach’, which delineates carefully the context, parties, interaction and behavioural dimensions of buyer–supplier-type relationships. Applied to outsourcing, this ‘approach’ enables us to shed some light on the crucial dimensions of IT outsourcing relationships. Exploratory research into 12 organisations identifies the potential of the ‘interaction approach’, in providing a comprehensive, consistent, holistic set of constructs to guide analysis. The constructs of ‘interaction’ and ‘atmosphere’ proved particularly useful in providing in-depth insights. However, other interaction constructs of ‘environment’, ‘parties’ and ‘institutionalisation and adaptation’ were limited in their operationalisability. The paper suggests how these can be supplemented, and how IT outsourcing relationships can then be studied over time more satisfactorily. The interaction approach, as applied to the qualitative research data, also helped to identify a number of management issues that warrant careful consideration if IT outsourcing relationship management is to be improved. At the same time, the research identified certain factors in IT outsourcing relationships not captured satisfactorily by the interaction approach, namely the centrality of the contract, the importance of formal processes, and the hidden costs of relationship management. One suggested way forward is to combine interaction, contract and transaction cost perspectives.

A review of the IT outsourcing empirical literature and future research directions

An enormous amount of information has been produced about the IT outsourcing phenomenon over the last 20 years, but one has to look to the academic literature for consistent, objective, and reliable research approaches and analyses. Our review finds that, in practice, the academic literature on IT outsourcing has very much honored both rigor and relevance in the ways in which research has been conducted. Our central purpose in the review was to answer two research questions: What has the empirical academic literature found about information technology outsourcing (ITO) decisions and outcomes? What are the gaps in knowledge to consider in future ITO research? To answer these questions, we examined 164 empirical ITO articles published between 1992 and 2010 in 50 journals. Adapting a method used by Jeyaraj et al. (2006), we encapsulated this vast empirical literature on ITO in a way that was concise, meaningful, and helpful to researchers. We coded 36 dependent variables, 138 independent variables, and 741 relationships between independent and dependent variables. By extracting the best evidence, we developed two models of outsourcing: one model addressed ITO decisions and one model addressed ITO outcomes. The model of ITO decisions includes independent variables associated with motives to outsource, transaction attributes, client firm characteristics, and influence sources. The model of ITO outcomes includes independent variables associated with client and supplier capabilities, relationship characteristics, contractual governance, decision characteristics, and transaction attributes. We also examined the interactions among broad categories of variables and the learning curve effects resulting from feedback loops. Overall, ITO researchers have a broad and deep understanding of ITO. However, the field continues to evolve as clients and suppliers on every inhabited continent participate actively in the global sourcing community. There is still much research yet to be done. We reviewed recent studies that have identified gaps in current knowledge and proposed future paths of research pertaining to strategic motivations, environmental influences, dynamic interactions, configurational and portfolio approaches, global destinations, emerging models, reference theory extension, and grounded theory development.

It and Business Process Outsourcing: The Knowledge Potential

Abstract Despite the widespread trends in IT and business process outsourcing, there has been too little focus on what happens to knowledge when an organization outsources. We present a framework for evaluating the knowledge potential within five different types of insourcing and outsourcing arrangements. A detailed example of an enterprise partnership relationship is described as a benchmark for how companies can leverage the knowledge potential from IT and BPO outsourcing.

Enterprise resource planning: the role of the CIO and it function in ERP

B y early 2000 the ERP revolution generated over

Risk mitigation in IT outsourcing strategy revisited : longitudinal case research at LISA

20 billion in revenues annually for suppliers and an additional

25th anniversary edition

20 billion for consulting firms. However, for many organizations ERP represents the return of the old IT catch-22 with a vengeance: competitively and technically it’s a must-do, but economically there is conflicting evidence, suggesting it is difficult to justify the associated costs, and difficult to implement to achieve a lasting business advantage. Critical success factors, and reasons for failure in ERP implementations, have now been widely researched [4–8]. However, what is more noticeable is how the difficulties experienced in ERP implementations and with their business value are not atypical of most IT projects, especially when they are large and complex, expensive, take over a year or more to install, use new technology, and impact significantly on the organizational culture and existing business processes [5, 6, 10, 11]. Our own work on ERP success and failure factors differs in one essential respect from all previous studies. We have identified serious neglect in ERP implementations in securing the most effective roles for the CIO and IT function. Moreover, in case studies we have found failures in this area to be correlated strongly to subsequent difficulties in achieving delivery and business value. This article spells out the several ways in which we have found the CIO and IT function (and relatedly it must be said, often senior business executives), asleep at the wheel on ERP. We then detail the more effective capabilities and organizational and cultural practices that explain ERP, and indeed wider IT, success. In practice, irrespective of the differing technologies being implemented, we have indeed found that there are still consistent IT management principles to be applied to ERP, and many lessons to be had from history.

Analysing four types of IT sourcing decisions in the context of scale, client/supplier interdependency and risk mitigation

Abstract The origins and history of a single case study of large-scale Information Technology (IT) outsourcing in the 1994–99 period is investigated in the United Kingdom Defence sector. Such deals are high risk and the paper describes types of risk and how the client organization sought to mitigate these. These risks and mitigation approaches are then analysed against a distinctive risk framework formulated for IT outsourcing. Risks emerging in terms of type and scope of outsourcing, vendor selection criteria and process, the role of the contract, retained capabilities and management processes, and partnering and relationship dimensions are then assessed against prior research findings. Two additional distinctive risks are identified from the case history arising from the public sector context and supplier long-term market strategy. A contribution of the paper is the revised risk framework for analysing IT outsourcing that is then presented. Finally, the implications of these findings for future research and practice are highlighted.

Measuring organizational IS effectiveness: an overview and update of senior management perspectives

A t the Journal of Information Technology (JIT), we print an editorial only for special issues and special occasions. This issue sees the completion of our 25th full volume and as such we are treating it as cause for celebration – hence our silver anniversary cover. It is all too obvious that the world of information technology (IT), has been transformed since 1986. Indeed, the technology then was hardly pervasive – personal computers were in their infancy. While there were many predictions, nobody could say with confidence how the technology and its use in organisations and society would play out. E-mail was clunky, expert systems were attracting much attention and artificial intelligence was the sexy field in which to work. Nobody talked of knowledge management, business process re-engineering, websites or browsers, enterprise systems or social networking. Indeed, though outsourcing had existed since the very start of business computing, in 1986 the term had not yet entered common currency. So, the last 25 years have given those working in the field of information systems (IS) an enormously stimulating roller coaster ride. So, with the dominant issues in the field changing by the year it has been exhilarating but also very challenging to take the JIT on a journey to establish its identity and place among the leading journals in information systems. And just as the past has been unpredictable, the signs are that the future will not be easy either for academic journals or for the field of information systems. Time, then, to do some reflection. This issue aims to capture that unpredictability while this editorial takes some of the points in the articles and relates them to the journal’s aspirations for the future. While we may not be able to say precisely where we are going or where we will be 25 years from now, we know the compass by which we shall navigate. Starting, then, with this issue, we asked Allen Lee if he would, as a senior scholar, write both a retrospective and a prospective assessment of the information systems field. He has produced – Retrospect and Prospect: Information Systems Research in the Last and Next 25 Years. Here, he poses a challenge – that our development of knowledge should be more constructivist and design science oriented than at present but from within our typical locus in universities, viz in the business schools and commerce faculties. Unlike, say, organisational behaviour, the field has not been stable for long enough for all its knowledge to be built cumulatively by hypothetico-deductive research. But, this is a provocation to the established disciplines and also a challenge to the IS journals. Can we achieve and retain sufficient respectability in the eyes of our peers while operating under different epistemic norms? Allen Lee shows that taken-for-granted concepts such as ‘information’, ‘theory’, ‘system’, ‘organization’, and ‘relevance’ need to be rethought and poses the challenge that the future development of the IS field may be better modelled on the research disciplines found in the professions, including medicine, engineering, architecture, and law. His insights and provocations are commented upon and extended by four interlocutors. Writing as a declared IS ‘native’, Mats Lundeberg is sympathetic to Lee’s perspective and focuses on the ramifications for research approaches, in particular commenting on problematising ‘theories in use’ and ‘espoused theories’, balancing prescriptions and general direction, and working with different levels of abstraction. Richard Baskerville welcomes Lee’s revisiting of systems theory but also argues that, in Lee’s perspective, technology seems more conceptually separated from organisational systems than reality might allow, and invites a further extension of Lee’s concerns on ‘organization’. Baskerville also offers a nuanced deliberation on the role of theory in IS, and points to the challenges involved in the anxiety to ‘scienc-ify’ the IS field, and the gulf between what and how IS is researched, and how it is taught, agreeing the need to anchor future scientific studies to problems of practice, but by anchoring bridges on both sides of the gulf. In his response to Allen Lee’s paper, Robert Davison argues that in some respects the changes need to be more radical than Lee suggests, including in the way Ph.D. students are trained, in the selection criteria for new teachers, and how leading journals support different types of research. Davison goes on to argue that emerging markets, particularly India and China, may also change approaches and assumptions in the IS field, though he worries that at the moment, a Western intellectual hegemony is being perpetuated in these countries rather than being reshaped. He employs a number of insights into the culture and politics of the IS field to support this contention, and suggests more context-sensitive problem shaping and research is necessary, and more questioning of dogmatic beliefs and taken-for-granted assumptions that are rife in the IS field. Chrisanthi Avgerou extends Davison’s concerns by arguing for richness and diversity in the IS field. She questions Lee’s suggested programme, wondering about the validity of the detection of common theories-in-use for a few fundamental concepts across the whole IS field, and also wary of its consequences. She argues that, in fact, the coexistence of alternative theories for an observed phenomenon is the norm rather than the exception, both in the natural and the social sciences. Moreover, there are institutional obstacles to publishing some types of research, for example, well founded socio-theoretical research, and design research. These obstacles should not be misdiagnosed Journal of Information Technology (2010) 25, 333–335 & 2010 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/10