Diffusion of Information Technology Outsourcing: Influence Sources and the Kodak Effect

Abstract

ture is steadily shifting away from pure hierarchical and market mechanisms toward hybrid and partnership modes that involve external vendors. In partic ular, IT outsourcing has recently emerged as a significant administrative in novation in an organization's IT strategy. This paper seeks to explore the sources of influence in the adoption of this innovation. For this purpose, we generated a comprehensive sample of outsourcing contracts in the US using an electronic bibliometric search process. Using diffusion modeling, our em pirical analysis shows that the adoption of IT outsourcing is motivated more by internal influence (or imitative behavior) than by external influence amongst the user organizations. Subsequently, we considered the widely publicized Eastman Kodak's outsourcing decision as a critical event to assess whether this internal influence is more pronounced in the post- Kodak regime than in the prt-Kodak regime. Our results show that internal influence is dominant in the post-Kodak regime but not in the prq-Kodak regime. Impli cations and directions for future research are discussed. Diffusion models—Information technology governance—Information technology outsourcing—Information technology strategy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 204 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.