What Providers Say about Establishing the Outsourcing Arrangement

Abstract

Over the course of many years, we have interviewed and surveyed thousands of outsourcing clients and providers. Clients have openly and willingly shared many outsourcing stories — both good and bad. Chapter 1 and much of our published work have focused on the client perspective — the things clients report about outsourcing. We have used their voices to identify best practices that differentiate outsourcing success from failure from the client perspective, including client decision-making frameworks (e.g., Lacity et al. 1996), contractual governance (e.g., Lacity and Hirschheim 1993), client capabilities to retain in-house after outsourcing (e.g., Feeny and Willcocks 1998), and various sourcing models including enterprise partnerships, netsourcing, offshore outsourcing, cloud computing, rural sourcing, and bundled sourcing (e.g., Kern et al. 2002a; Lacity et al. 2003, 2004; Lacity and Rottman 2008; Lacity et al. 2010b; Willcocks et al. 2010a, b, c, 2011;Willcocks et al. 2010b).