Information systems services outsourcing reality in large Portuguese organisations

Outsourcing has become a major component of information technology strategy in many companies around the world. From the early 1990s to the present, the reality of sourcing has varied significantly, an example being the services that companies typically choose to transfer to external providers, which are now different from those of one or two decades ago. This paper discusses the results of a survey conducted to determine the current outsourcing status of information systems services in large Portuguese organisations, by identifying the services that companies keep inside their boundaries and services that companies outsource to vendors. It also presents a comparison of the results from this study with results from studies developed in other countries. These findings should be useful both for researchers, who can use it to study the outsourcing and information systems function evolution, and for practitioners, mainly vendors, who may use it to build up its offer in agreement with the buyers' needs and wishes.