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Should This Software Component Be Developed Inside or Outside Our Firm? - A Design Science Perspective on the Sourcing of Application Systems

  • Conference paper
New Studies in Global IT and Business Service Outsourcing (Global Sourcing 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 91))

Abstract

From a national and global perspective, the sourcing of application systems has significantly matured and been widely adopted over the past years. However, little research has been conducted regarding the properties and contingencies of outsourced technological artifacts. In most scholarly published contributions, it is often difficult to find the IT artifact in the IS sourcing debate. Especially, it has not yet been explored on which rationales certain parts of an IS architecture are handed over to external vendors or kept in-house. In order to overcome this drawback, we focus in this paper on the outsourcing decision for components of IS architectures. This, in turn, directs the focus to the properties of software components and their surrounding contingency factors which may facilitate the decision to outsource a component or not. Thus, the unit of analysis will not be on an organizational or work group level, but rather on the level of a technological artifact itself: the software component which needs to be developed among others in order to achieve the desired system functionality. We are not aware of any research contributions in IS sourcing which have been conducted on a software component level so far. Thus, we aim to contribute towards an underexplored topic which is highly important since organizational decisions towards outsourcing are deeply rooted in the technical functionalities of the desired systems.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Tommi Kramer, Armin Heinzl & Kai Spohrer

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  1. Tommi Kramer
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  2. Armin Heinzl
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  3. Kai Spohrer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Julia Kotlarsky

  2. London School of Economics, London, UK

    Leslie P. Willcocks

  3. Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Ilan Oshri

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kramer, T., Heinzl, A., Spohrer, K. (2011). Should This Software Component Be Developed Inside or Outside Our Firm? - A Design Science Perspective on the Sourcing of Application Systems. In: Kotlarsky, J., Willcocks, L.P., Oshri, I. (eds) New Studies in Global IT and Business Service Outsourcing. Global Sourcing 2011. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 91. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24815-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24815-3_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24814-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24815-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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