Cloud Sourcing – Next Generation Outsourcing?

Abstract

Although Cloud Sourcing has been around for some time it could be questioned what actually is known about it. This paper presents a literature review on the specific question if Cloud Sourcing could be seen as the next generation of outsourcing. The reason for doing this is that from an initial sourcing study we found that the sourcing decisions seems to go in the direction of outsourcing as a service which could be described as Cloud Sourcing. Whereas some are convinced that Cloud Sourcing reduces cost and complexity in advantage for increased labor productivity, others maintain that the negotiation with the cloud provider is crucial to ensure data privacy, security regulations, compliance, standards, tolerance for risk, governance and service level agreements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the debate on Cloud Sourcing in the top IS conferences and AIS basket of 8 journals goes in the direction of Cloud Sourcing being the future of sourcing as practice predicts, and to identify the space for the development of this research. An introductory literature review showed that there is not much written about Cloud Sourcing as an alternative for outsourcing albeit it seems to have a great potential.

Dynamic capabilities triggered by cloud sourcing: a stage-based model of business model innovation

“…The introduction of cloud computing (Schneider and Sunyaev 2016) and cloud sourcing (Muhic and Johansson 2014;Willcocks et al 2013a, b) represent a potentially important option to not only simplify the outsourcing of IT elements but more importantly to develop strategic innovation capabilities in order to strengthen the firm's competitive advantage (Legner et al 2017;Willcocks et al 2013b). However, given the historic technology focus of the IT-function, the traditional role as an internal service provider and the separation between the IT-department and business departments (Legner et al 2017;Vithayathil 2018) the potential of cloud sourcing to become a driver of strategic innovation remains problematic and challenging (Vithayathil 2018).…”

“…The decision to outsource a firm's IT-resources and activities to the cloud, i.e., to adopt, integrate and continued use of cloud services from external cloud providers, we here define as cloud sourcing (Muhic and Johansson 2014;Schneider and Sunyaev 2016). Current research on cloud sourcing from an organizational perspective has been dominated by issues regarding the characteristics and advantages of cloud sourcing (e.g., Mell and Grance 2011), cloud adoption (e.g., Schneider and Sunyaev 2016) and to a lesser degree on cloud continuance (e.g., Ratten 2016).…”

When traditional information technology project managers encounter the cloud: Opportunities and dilemmas in the transition to cloud services

“…While the social and cultural determinants of traditional IT project success are well understood, cloud projects have changed the project management method in software development and infrastructure implementation projects. Despite this, many IT project managers have only been equipped with general skills to manage IT projects (Muhic & Johansson, 2014) and may be missing skills vital to manage the transition to cloud projects. Risks in cloud computing projects that the managers may need to work with include tool immaturity, unavailability of skills, increased engineering costs, and compliance issues.…”

Cloud-Based Outsourcing Framework for Efficient IT Project Management Practices

“…Another research of Muhic et al [14] reviewed was related to the next generation outsourcing overcloud. This case study exposed new knowledge that cloud sourcing reduces cost and complexity in the advantage of increased labor productivity.…”