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Around 1990, outsourcing evolved to a model of Application Service Provider (ASP). However, more recently it has been evolving and diversifying to a pure services model (Vassiliadis et al., 2006).
Outsourcing is not a new concept and has existed, in one way or another, already many years (Nam et al., 1995), but in last two decades gained prominence in the last decade, with broader horizons and new perspectives to offer.
Outsourcing describes the use of external resources to execute operational tasks (Grover et al., 1994). In the past, the corporate activities which were the subject of outsourcing constituted mechanical activities, or processes with low added value, however, currently many business processes are outsourced (Hoecht & Trott, 2006). The two main actors of outsourcing processes are the “outsourced” and the “outsourcer” (Saunders & Gebelt, 1997). The first, i.e., the “customer”, outsources his processes, while the second, the enterprise, delivers outsourced services.
The benefits of outsourcing outlined in the literature are various: economies of scale (Zineldin & Bredenlow, 2003), reduction of operational costs (Lacity & Hirschheim, 1993), access to a skilled workforce (Kakabadse & Kakabadse, 2002), shorter lead times, in-creased flexibility and cost efficiency (Nieminen & Takala, 2006), and the ability to transform fixed costs into variable costs (Alexander & Young, 1996). On the other hand, there are other works that show risks: hidden costs (Barthelemy, 2001), supplier dependency (Alexander & Young, 1996) and loss of know-how (Doig et al., 2001), to cite the most significant ones. In this scenario, outsourcing represents an opportunity as well as a challenge to many organizations (Barden-Fuller et al., 2005).