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Introduction: Riding the Waves of Outsourcing Change in the Era of Digital Transformation

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Information Systems Outsourcing

Part of the book series: Progress in IS ((PROIS))

Abstract

The trend towards digital transformation has brought about a number of emerging challenges for information systems outsourcing. Organizations have to understand how to digitally innovate through IS outsourcing, how to govern outsourced digitalization projects, how to cope with complex multi vendor and micro-services arrangements, how to manage data sourcing and data partnerships, including issues of cybersecurity, and how to cope with the increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing and robotic process automation. This introductory chapter summarizes these challenges as three entangled or intermingled waves of change. It shows how recent research addresses these waves of change as a basis for organizations to learn how to successfully ride the waves.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Machine learning aims to provide increasing levels of automation in the knowledge engineering process, replacing much time-consuming human activity with automatic techniques that improve accuracy or efficiency by discovering and exploiting regularities in training data.” (Langley and Simon 1995, p. 55).

  2. 2.

    According to Wikipedia drawing on the manufacturing context (based on Groover 2014), “Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance.”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems (IWI), Information Engineering, University of Bern, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Jens Dibbern

  2. E. J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Rudy Hirschheim

Authors
  1. Jens Dibbern
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  2. Rudy Hirschheim
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Correspondence to Jens Dibbern .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Rudy Hirschheim

  2. School of Business, University Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Armin Heinzl

  3. Institute for Information Systems, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Jens Dibbern

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Dibbern, J., Hirschheim, R. (2020). Introduction: Riding the Waves of Outsourcing Change in the Era of Digital Transformation. In: Hirschheim, R., Heinzl, A., Dibbern, J. (eds) Information Systems Outsourcing. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45819-5_1

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