The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, a publications of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, has devoted an entire issue to IT Outsourcing. Jens Dibbern, Time Goles, Rudy Hirschheim and Bandula Jayatilaka take over the entire issue for a journal-length review of everything that has been done.
One of the interesting things was that they did not find much research outside of IT. You’d think that this would not be true, so I figure that they simply used the wrong search terms. I’m not exactly sure what the Automotive Industry’s terms were for what we call “outsourcing” in IT but surely the concept has been central to management practices there for some time.