A review of the IT outsourcing literature: Insights for practice
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Structure of service level agreements (SLA) in IT outsourcing: The construct and its measurement
Information Systems Frontiers
Organizational Learning and Capabilities for Onshore and Offshore Business Process Outsourcing
Journal of Management Information Systems
International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions
Offshore insourcing in software development: Structuring the decision-making process
Journal of Systems and Software
Organizational Learning and Capabilities for Onshore and Offshore Business Process Outsourcing
Journal of Management Information Systems
Hybrid Relational-Contractual Governance for Business Process Outsourcing
Journal of Management Information Systems
Proceedings of the 2013 annual conference on Computers and people research
Critical success factors in enterprise resource planning systems: Review of the last decade
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
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There is unprecedented interest in digitally enabled extended enterprises that enable firms to gain access to specialized skills and capabilities globally. Given this motivation, firms are unbundling their value chain processes and exploring new sourcing mechanisms. With the emergence of world-class skills and capabilities in offshore locations, new sourcing mechanisms have become available beyond traditional domestic insourcing and outsourcing. However, there is little systematic research examining how firms choose sourcing mechanisms for their business processes. This study views the digitally enabled extended enterprise as a complex system of business processes and examines how sourcing choices are made in such enterprises. It builds on the modular systems theory to posit that modularization of business processes and their underlying information technology (IT) support infrastructures are associated with the choice of sourcing mechanisms for the processes. The study tests this proposition in a sample of business process sourcing choices made by 93 medium and large U.S. firms. The results show that firms tend to choose domestic outsourcing for processes that are high in modularity and offshore outsourcing for processes that are low in modularity. Further, when processes can be detached from a firm's IT infrastructure, firms tend to use offshore outsourcing. However, when processes are tightly coupled with underlying IT infrastructure, it may be infeasible to detach processes and execute them in remote locations. Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.