Introduction: Riding the Waves of Outsourcing Change in the Era of Digital Transformation

Abstract

The trend towards digital transformation has brought about a number of emerging challenges for information systems outsourcing. Organizations have to understand how to digitally innovate through IS outsourcing, how to govern outsourced digitalization projects, how to cope with complex multi vendor and micro-services arrangements, how to manage data sourcing and data partnerships, including issues of cybersecurity, and how to cope with the increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing, cloud sourcing and robotic process automation. This introductory chapter summarizes these challenges as three entangled or intermingled waves of change. It shows how recent research addresses these waves of change as a basis for organizations to learn how to successfully ride the waves.