Sourcing Trends Predictions - An Analysis of Regions and Strategies

This paper aims to highlight historical trends regarding information systems (IS) sourcing, as well as glimpsing into the subject's future. Depending on economic growth, industrialization and changes in the political climate, certain countries have become either less or more attractive as destination countries for IS sourcing. As outsourcing strategies becomes more mature, especially in the IS sector, organizations are choosing different paths and regions for their endeavours. In the recent years the trend in IS sourcing has been to move IT operations closer to home and nearshoring has been the strategy option of choice for many organizations post termination of their offshore ventures. Regarding sourcing trends will we most likely see an increase of a multisourcing strategy which could be labelled as outsourcing as a service, including multiple vendors for interdependent services. In reality this means that organizations will be using a strategy that combines outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring, nearshoring and cloud services such as software as a service, and that implies that multisourcing and how to configure the multisourcing option will be a crucial task for many organizations in the near future.