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IS Offshoring: A Systematic Review of the Literature

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IS Offshoring

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Abstract

This paper provides a consolidated view of existing academic research in Information Systems (IS) offshoring from 1996 to 2006. It identifies relevant research, consolidates and categorizes its results, discusses them, and suggests future research directions. The results show that IS offshoring represents a new research area with most research being published during 2003 to 2006. Non-theory based descriptive research designs predominate. Most studies focus on the questions of why to offshore, how to offshore, and the outcome of IS offshoring. Other aspects such as what services to offshore or which decision to make are under-researched. Future research could focus on these areas. More empirical-confirmatory research might enrich the IS offshoring body of knowledge by providing findings that are based on more diversified patterns of research designs.

A shorter version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) 2007: Westner, M., & Strahringer, S. (2007). Current state of IS offshoring research: A descriptive meta-analysis. In J. Mäkiö, S. Betz, & R. Stephan (Eds.), Offshoring of software development. Methods and tools for risk management (pp. 7–22). Karlsruhe: Universitätsverlag Karlsruhe.

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Westner, M.K. (2009). IS Offshoring: A Systematic Review of the Literature. In: IS Offshoring. Gabler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-8349-8407-4_2

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