Abstract
Information technology outsourcing—the practice of transferring IT assets, leases, staff, and management responsibility for delivery of services from internal IT functions to third party vendors—has become an undeniable trend ever since Kodak’s 1989 landmark decision. In recent years, private and public sector organizations worldwide have outsourced significant portions of their IT functions, among them British Aerospace, British Petroleum, Canadian Post Office, Chase Manhattan Bank, Continental Airlines, Continental Bank, First City, General Dynamics, Inland Revenue, JP Morgan, Kodak, Lufthansa, McDonnell Douglas, South Australian Government, Swiss Bank, Xerox, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (Hirsheim & Lacity, 2000). How should firms organize their enterprise-wide activities related to the acquisition, deployment, and management of information technology? During the 1980s, IT professionals devoted considerable attention to this issue, primarily debating the virtues of centralized, decentralized, and federal modes of governance. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, IT researchers anticipated and followed these debates, eventually reaching considerable consensus regarding the influence of different contingency factors on an enterprise’s choice of a particular governance mode (Sambamurthy & Zmud, 2000).