In den 80er Jahren haben große Unternehmen den Beweis dafür erbracht, daß Wettbewerbsvorteile durch den erfolgreichen Einsatz von IT gesichert werden können. In den 90er Jahren war Kodak eines der ersten Fortune 500 Unternehmen, das den Standpunkt vertrat, IT sei in erster Linie eine Ware, die am besten bei Fachverkäufern aufgehoben sei. Früher ging es beim Outsourcing hauptsächlich um Kostensenkung. Heute geht es darum, dynamische Gruppen zu verpflichten, die schnell auf Unternehmensbedürfnisse und Marktchancen reagieren. "Global Information Technology Outsourcing" erläutert, wie man sich einen entscheidenden Wettbewerbsvorteil verschafft, indem man beim IT-Outsourcing eine gewisse Flexibilität entwickelt aber gleichzeitig die Kontrolle darüber behält. Mit Beispielen aus einer Studie mit 75 internationalen Unternehmen, darunter auch Dupont, British Aerospace und BP Exploration.

Mary Cecelia Lacity is Associate Professor of IS MIS at the University of Missouri, St. Louis and a Research Affiliate at Templeton College, Oxford University. Her research focuses on IT management practices in sourcing, IT privatization, benchmarking, IT metrics, and client/server development. She has conducted case studies in over seventy-five organizations, surveying both US and European IT management practices and given executive seminars world-wide. She was the recipient of the 2000 World Outsourcing Achievement Award sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Michael Corbett and Associates. Previous publications include: Strategic Sourcing of Information Systems and articles in academic and practitioner publications such as the HBR, Sloan Management Review and MIS Quarterly. She is currently US Editor of the Journal of Information Technology.
Leslie P. Willcocks has an international reputation for his work on information Management, IT evaluation and information Systems Outsourcing. He is Fellow and University Reader at Templeton College, University of Oxford; Visiting Professor at Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam; Professorial Associate at the University of Melbourne, and Distinguished Visitor at AGSM. He holds a doctorate in information systems from the University of Cambridge, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology. He is co-author of sixteen books, including Strategic Sourcing of Information Systems and Beyond The IT Productivity Paradox with Wiley. He has published over one hundred and thirty papers in journals such as HBR; Sloan Management Review; MISQ; Communications of the ACM, and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems.