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The purpose of this paper is to review recent trends and issues in global IT sourcing and to introduce papers in the special issue: “Social, managerial and knowledge aspects in global IT sourcing”.

The paper examines trends by regions including Brazil, Russia, India and China and also trends in Captive Centres and their strategies.

There will be a continuing rise in outsourcing revenues for global outsourcing, with BPO overtaking ITO within five years. Multi‐sourcing will continue to be the dominant trend. India will continue to dominate but its role will change. China heralds promise but will still struggle to achieve scale in Western European and North American markets. Emerging country competition will intensify. Software as a service will be a “slow burner” but will gain momentum in the second half of the next decade. Near‐shoring will be a strong trend. Outsourcing, by offering a potential alternative, will help discipline in‐house capabilities and service. Knowledge process outsourcing will increase as the BRIC and emerging countries move up the value chain. Captive activity – both buying and selling – will increase (see below). Outsourcing successes and disappointments will continue as both clients and suppliers struggle to deal with a highly dynamic set of possibilities

The paper is of value to both academics and practitioners working in the field of IT sourcing. The study of captive centres is in its early stages and the paper introduces further work in this area.

To identify key lessons, trends and enduring challenges with global outsourcing of back office services.

The authors extract lessons, project trends, and discuss enduring challenges from a 20 year research program conducted by these authors and their extended network of co‐authors and colleagues.

The authors identify seven important lessons for successfully exploiting the maturing Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) markets. The lessons require back office executives to build significant internal capabilities and processes to manage global outsourcing. The authors predict 13 trends about the size and growth of ITO and BPO markets, about suppliers located around the world, and about particular sourcing models including application service provision, insourcing, nearshoring, rural sourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, freelance outsourcing, and captive centers. The authors identify five persistent, prickly issues on global outsourcing pertaining to back office alignment, client and supplier incentives, knowledge transfer, knowledge retention, and sustainability of outsourcing relationships.

The authors present some experimental innovations to address these issues.

Utilising data from 18 in‐depth case studies, this study seeks to explore training, development and human resource development (HRD) practices in European call centres. It aims to argue that the complexity and diversity of training, development and HRD practices is best understood by studying the multilayered contexts within which call centres operate. Call centres operate as open systems and training, development and HRD practices are influenced by environmental, strategic, organisational and temporal conditions.

The study utilised a range of research methods, including in‐depth interviews with multiple stakeholders, documentary analysis and observation. The study was conducted over a two‐year period.

The results indicate that normative models of HRD are not particularly valuable and that training, development and HRD in call centres is emergent and highly complex.

This study represents one of the first studies to investigate training and development and HRD practices and systems in European call centres.

Offshore outsourcing offers competitive advantages when goods and services are produced economically and with acceptable or superior quality by suppliers located outside a firm's home country. The purpose of this paper is to focus on India as a destination for offshore outsourcing of services and the challenges it faces in maintaining its leadership in this area. The paper discusses the growth of services outsourcing and the economic and environmental forces that have contributed to the outsourcing of high‐end services, also known as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).

This article surveys the literature of offshore outsourcing and identifies strategic drivers and options that can help India to grow and consolidate its position as an exporter of services and build long‐term competitive advantages in its relationships with global partners. To understand why nations gain competitive advantage in certain industries, Porter's “diamond” model is utilized as a broad framework for examining policies and national strategies that can sustain India's competitive advantage in outsourcing of knowledge‐based services. The paper discusses India's current and prospective assets and liabilities that correspond to the model's four components.

The article discusses India's competitive edge as a leading supplier of knowledge‐based services and proposes a model for sustaining this edge. The model proposes key policy steps to move from the current position (e.g. supplier of business process outsourcing services) to a role of knowledge leader by providing advanced value added services to global clients. This model suggests ways in which a supplier nation can gain leverage in the value chain.

The article is conceptual, not empirical. Public and corporate policy implications are presented to strengthen India's competitive advantages in outsourced services.

The article presents a strategic roadmap with policy implications that can help move India up the value chain from being primarily a destination for low‐end business process outsourcing (BPO) to that of a co‐equal, high value‐adding partner or principal who offers knowledge leadership in the design and delivery of services for global markets.

The article discusses a nation's technical strengths, as well as cultural and infrastructure weaknesses, that can contribute to volatility as a global outsourcing leader. The article also presents strategies that can reduce a nation's vulnerabilities to competitive actions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the outsourcing process in the public sector, determine the effective factors involved in this process and their priorities. The aim is to develop a generic conceptual model for the outsourcing process in public sectors.

This paper is based on the results of literature review and conducting binominal and Friedman tests. The model consists of the following steps and components: considering the organization's basic activities, evaluation of organizations' existing potentials and analyzing organizational processes, studying general outsourcing patterns, implementing and monitoring outsourcing process in terms of some critical success factors; and evaluation of outsourcing process of the organization and identifying feedbacks.

The paper determines the main components and influence factors involving in the process of outsourcing in public sectors. The generic model developed in this paper as a framework can be used to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of the outsourcing process of organizations in public sector.

The authors believe that the proposed model and results of this research can aid public sector managers to implement their outsourcing process in a more efficient and effective manner in their organizations.

This paper develops a new generic conceptual model based on literature review, field resaech and using binominal and Frideman test. This model is unique and can be considered as an aid in the outsourcing process of organizations.

The case deals with a chain of hospitals, that has grown vary fast in last few years as a result of various acquisitions and new developments. The hospital chain is lagging behind in use of technology. The IT department is inward looking and the focus is more on provide support services rather than strategic orientation. A new CIO takes charge of the IT department and decides to transform IT from playing a support to strategic role. He identifies cloud computing as a tool to take the leap. The case provides an opportunity to discuss the type of service and deployment models of benefits of cloud technology. A rough data to do financial evaluation of cloud technology is presented. Evaluation parameters that may be used to decide on cloud versus in-house technology are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards development of a management framework for offshore business process outsourcing (BPO).

This paper utilises longitudinal case studies to identify success factors in managing offshore BPO via the captive model (i.e. wholly‐owned subsidiary).

Success in offshore BPO is based on a combination of cost savings, technical service quality and strategic issues, is specific to business context and will change over time. Choice of engagement model (e.g. captive operation or arms‐length contracting) is an important success factor. Advantages of captive centers arise from higher levels of relationship quality, trust and collaboration effectiveness.

This paper focuses on two global companies in two industry sectors (airlines and telecommunications), and both have adopted one particular BPO model (i.e. captive operation).

The paper contributes to scarce literature on offshore captive BPO operations, the most common but also least researched engagement model. The findings have practical implications for managers designing offshore BPO strategy.

This paper aims to serve as a response to the article “Innovation returns from offshored IT R&D”.

The paper highlights two aspects relating to captive centres and R&D offshoring: what R&D is offshored, and understanding foreign direct investment decisions in the context of captives.

Many captive centres have gone through a complex evolutionary path during which they have evolved from a cost centre to become a profit centre. WNS and Genpact are just two examples of such behaviour. Such an approach, and in many cases a reality, should change our approach as to how we assess the returns on offshoring investment by simply taking into account the strategic intent behind such an investment.

This article serves as a response to the research paper “Innovation returns from offshored IT R&D” by Datta and Bhattacharyya in this issue.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the unique contributions from social (i.e. trust climate, departmental integration) and organisational factors (i.e. managerial recognition, goal clarity and technology support) to work engagement and identification with the organisation in a human resource offshoring (HRO) context.

Participants were recruited from a large Australian financial institution with an HR centre located in the Philippines. Ninety-one members of the captive HR centre completed the anonymous online questionnaire consisting of quantitative items and open-ended fields. Regression analyses were conducted to ascertain the relationships hypothesised.

The findings suggest that goal clarity is a key predictor of both engagement and identification with the organisation, and that technology support and managerial recognition also influence offshore staff members’ motivation and workplace attitudes.

The cross-sectional, self-report nature of the study, along with the small sample obtained, are noted as limitations of the study. Nevertheless, the high response rate (91 per cent) and availability of qualitative data provide valuable insight into the key factors that impact HRO operations and performance.

The study uncovers social and organisational variables that affect staff motivation and attitudes in an HRO context, and offers a number of guidelines for practitioners operating in these settings, focussing on goal clarity, managerial recognition and technology support.

The study contributes to a growing body of research into the organisational and human capital factors that account for HRO performance and sustainability, and offers preliminary evidence for their unique contributions to key performance drivers. Guidelines for future research and business practice are proposed, namely, the consideration of multilevel and temporal approaches to the management and investigation of HRO operations.

Offshoring has been studied widely in the literature on strategic management and international business. However, apart from its consideration as an administrative activity, scant attention has been paid to the offshoring of the human resource (HR) function. Research in this regard has instead focussed on outsourcing (Reichel and Lazarova, 2013). The purpose of this paper is to achieve a better understanding of companies’ decisions to offshore HR activities. It adapts the outsourcing model of Baron and Kreps (1999) by including the HR offshoring phenomenon and a dynamic perspective.

While the analysis is mostly conceptual, the authors ground the author’s arguments in offshoring data from the Offshoring Research Network, to explore whether the drivers for offshoring HR differ from the drivers for offshoring other administrative activities. The idiosyncrasy of the HR function is supported by the authors’ exploratory analysis and also by the descriptive case of a multinational and its experience with offshoring.

A coevolutionary model is proposed for understanding the behaviour of companies offshoring their HR activities. This study contends that companies should address their decision to offshore HR activities from a dynamic perspective, being aware of three processes that are in constant change: the evolution of the HR function, the evolution of service providers, and the evolution of offshoring decisions.

This study seeks to make a threefold contribution to the international business, strategy, and HR management disciplines.