Antecedents of the Outsourcing Relationship: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Recently, the advancement in business competition is increasing. Outsourcing has become an important strategy in the organizations. Most of the outsourcing objectives are for cost-saving and focusing on the main activities in the organization. To realize the importance of outsourcing, the goal of this research is to explore the key theoretical views that are related to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) relationships which BPO and ITO, which are the same, means that others are responsible for the non-core work but is a different part of the work. Therefore, this research is interesting in terms of seeing the different perspectives of outsourcing. The research articles in the ScienceDirect database from 2000 to 2018 with related domains were collected using related keywords such as BPO, ITO, outsourcing performance, and outsourcing contract duration. After all relative papers were collected, they are categorized into four major topics including (1) Understanding in outsourcing, (2) Related costs in outsourcing, (3) Outsourced long-term relationships, and (4) Internal control systems in outsourced projects. Based on our systematic review, this study summarized the current trends of research in the concerned areas, together with significant findings that can be applied, integrated, or compared with this study.