Next Generation Outsourcing – A Research Agenda Guided By Practice

Over the last decades outsourcing has established itself as widely accepted management practice. Information systems researchers have spent considerable effort in studying the outsourcing phenomenon and theorizing about it. Through the interaction between research and practice, as well as through own experiences, industry managers underwent a noticeable learning curve. This poses the question: is research still up to date or do we need to think about the next stage, a form of next generation outsourcing? To investigate this issue, expert interviews with thirteen sourcing managers from different industries have been conducted. The aim was to learn about the state of outsourcing management in practice and to identify what the new topics are which keep outsourcing managers awake at night. The basis for the structured interviews was a thorough analysis of the outsourcing literature. Building on these the interviewees were asked to discuss their experiences and to highlight current issues of concern. We identified four emerging topics which call for further research: (1) Multi-vendor Outsourcing and Sourcing Networks, (2) Cloud Computing and its implications for outsourcing, (3) Risk Management of Outsourcing, and (4) Methods to bridge the Offshoring gap