Foreword to the special issue on IS sourcing

Excerpt

The issue of information systems (IS) sourcing has been an area of interest of the IS community for almost two decades now. IS sourcing refers to the entire set of processes ranging from initiating and preparing the decision to provide an organization’s IS function(s) in-house or externally by a legally independent service provider (or some combination of the two options); making the decision; implementing the decision; and evaluating and potentially changing or confirming (i.e. renewing) the decision. The reason for the continued interest in IS sourcing is closely related to the steady change of the phenomenon itself. While in the early 1990s the interest in IS sourcing gained momentum by the appearance of IS outsourcing megadeals involving clients such as Kodak (Applegate and Montealegre 1991), Continental Bank (Huber 1993) and BP (Cross 1995) with providers such as Electronic Data Systems and International Business Machines, now new forms of outsourcing arrangements (such as selective outsourcing, joint ventures, strategic alliances, and spin-offs), stories of successes and failures, decisions to backsource, as well as a variety of innovative approaches for developing and managing outsourcing relationships have led to an ever increasing complexity of the phenomenon. …