Sourcing processes are discussed at a high abstraction level. A dedicated terminology is developed concerning general aspects of sourcing. The term sourcement is coined to denote a building block for sourcing. Notions of allocation, functional architecture and allocational architecture, equilibrium, and configuration are discussed. Limitations of the concept of outsourcing are outlined. This th...

Outsourcing is now a widely accepted part of dong business. What started as a mechanism to lower costs is now an integral part of a much larger IT strategy. Today, newer forms of outsourcing are on the horizon and newer approaches that will change yet again how IT sourcing decisions are made. Better connectivity, the availability of high quality staff, and much lower costs in other countries ar...

Motivated by the recent trend of offshoring manufacturing facilities to seek lower production cost, while keeping some costly local facilities to better respond to changes in market demand, this paper studies a dual sourcing policy and characterizes the average sourcing allocation. We consider the total landed cost from origin (combining a cheap but slow source and a fast but expensive source) ...

This research investigates the knowledge sourcing requirements of teams that implement novel IT projects. It then compares those requirements to the mainstream strategy proffered in the literature for knowledge reuse within project environments. Using a grounded theory approach, this research found that the knowledge sourcing requirements do not align with the mainstream strategy, which is base...

Previous research has identified significant risks involved in IT sourcing, which can undermine business performance. IT governance research has proposed mechanisms to mitigate some of these risks. While this relationship seems evident, it remains unexplored in most IT sourcing research. Our review of IT sourcing articles published in the top three IS journals shows that, only 48% addressed gov...

With the advancement of Service-Oriented Architecture in the technical and business domain, the management & engineering of services requires a thorough and systematic understanding of the service lifecycle for both business and software services. However, while service-oriented approaches acknowledge the importance of the service ecosystem, service lifecycle models are typically internally foc...

Software outsourcing has been the subject of much research in the past 25 years, largely because of potential cost savings envisaged through lower labour costs, ‘follow-the-sun’ development, access to skilled developers, and proximity to new markets. In recent years, the success of the open source phenomenon has inspired a number of new forms of sourcing that combine the potential of global sou...

This paper considers a monopolistic manufacturer that makes supplier selection and ordering decisions in a setting in which suppliers are unreliable. We find that the manufacturer’s optimal decision to diversify orders across multiple suppliers might not only arise as a result of managing supply risk, but it could also be due to the concavity of the manufacturer’s revenue function or due to the...