离岸外包：对于信息系统领域的挑战外文原文.pdfVIP

Offshore Outsourcing: Challenge to the Information Systems Discipline Rudy Hirschheim Ourso College of Business, Louisana State University 1 The Growth of Offshoring Outsourcing as a means of meeting organizational information technology needs is now a commonly accepted and growing practice, and one that is continually evolving. From its beginnings as a cost-reduction tool, many now feel outsourcing has evolved into a vital component of a firms overall business strategy. It has grown from the domain of IT embodying decisions such as where and how to source IT to a much wider set of business functions: logistics, payroll, human resources, legal, and so forth. To be sure, the generic notion of ‘outsourcing’ – making arrangements with an external entity for the provision of goods or services to supplement or replace internal efforts – has been around for centuries. Yet, IT outsourcing is fundamentally different: IT is pervasive throughout the organization. It is not a homogenous function, but rather is interrelated with virtually all organizational activities. And it is strategic. Until the late 1980s, strategic functions were thought to be incapable of being outsourced; however, Kodak changed that belief. Now whether a function is strategic or not makes little difference regarding outsourcing. Virtually all functions are candidates for outsourcing. Clearly, outsourcing is no passing fad (Dibbern et al. 2004). The past several years have seen a remarkable growth in not only IT outsourcing but where IT is outsourced to vendors who are based in different countries from the client. This is the so-called ‘offshore outsourcing’ (‘offshoring’ for short) and the IS field could find itself in the unenviable