The aim of this paper is to identify a set of papers that play the central role in IT Outsourcing (ITO) field and to analyze the evolution process that has taken place in ITO. The methodology is based on the main path analysis which is aimed to trace the main knowledge flow through a citation network that is formed by the citation relationship among papers in a scientific field. Results show that the ITO development process can largely be divided into three stages: at the beginning the studies concentrated on the determinants and decision problems of ITO, and then the ITO entered into a fast development stage, till now it has matured enough that researchers try to extend both breadth and depth of the research.
I. INTRODUCTIONFTER the tremendous success of Eastman Kodak's effects, IT Outsourcing (ITO) has become a hot topic and experienced a considerable growth during the past 20 years. Indeed the field of ITO research has grown so fast that there are many literature reviews on ITO [1]-[6]. Dibbern et al. (2004) is the most comprehensive in terms of depth of analyses [6], and it covered the literatures up until the year 2000. The authors summarized ITO decision (why, what, which) and implementation (how, outcome) by exploring the academic literatures on ITO. The authors also identified future research directions. Gonzalez et al. (2006) identified the main topics in ITO after reviewing 131 articles till 2005. Chadee et al. (2009) is the first review which focused on empirical studies for IT Services (ITS) [4]. In this paper, four main areas of empirical research were identified after reviewing 78 empirical papers on ITS over the 1992-2007 period and the authors also identified several gaps in knowledge. Lacity et al. (2009) extracted insights for practice on six ITO topics relevant to practitioners by reviewing 191 ITO articles. Lacity et al. (2010) synthesized 164 empirical ITO articles during 1992-2010, and developed two models of ITO: one model addressed ITO decisions and one model addressed ITO outcomes.
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