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The purpose of this paper is to examine key emerging trends in sourcing of business services.

The paper is primarily theoretical and observational. It is based on the author's review of major academic and managerial publications, extensive interactions with industry leaders and prior experience in the industry.

Scale and scope of sourcing of business services from across firm and national boundaries is increasing. Offshore is increasingly being leveraged for higher value activities. As business services get more industrialized, activities are being split into smaller units for servicing, and a services supply chain is beginning to emerge. With sourcing becoming more strategic, risk management has become more complex and critical.

This paper provides an overview of significant emerging trends in sourcing of business services. Further complementary research – theoretical, survey or case‐study based – on each of these identified trends will help develop a more exhaustive understanding.

This paper provides business executives with a framework to view emerging changes in sourcing of business services, and to better prepare for future opportunities and challenges.

This paper takes a holistic view at sourcing of business services and identifies some key emerging trends. The review of academic, managerial and popular press publications, and insights gathered from the field have been summarized into this succinct overview. This perspective should guide further focused academic research as well as practical application in business projects.

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 investigate how the professional service outsourcing (PSO) firm’s external knowledge integration with global clients, internal integration across various functional units and the synergistic effects between them in improving PSO performance.

Drawing on the theory of organizational learning, a conceptual framework is proposed with hypothesized relationships. The relationships in this conceptual model were tested using a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze a survey dataset including 192 Indian-based professional service providers.

A service provider’s performance is positively associated with its external integration with global clients and internal integration across various functional units. Synergistic effect is generated from balanced high-level external and internal integration in improving PSO performance.

This study contributes to the much-needed efforts in studying PSO, a new and fast-growing cross-border professional service activity, and provides helpful managerial implications to practicing global clients and offshore PSO service providers on how to successfully manage and govern the outsourcing process to achieve expected benefits.

This study focuses on offshore service provider’s viewpoint to extend traditional supply-chain integration regarding cooperative and mutually beneficial mechanisms to the context of PSO.

Finance and accounting (FA) offshore outsourcing is a growing trend involving a relocation of business processes to Asia but only few studies focus on understanding the issues that underlie the relocation of FA services. This paper aims to provide understanding of transaction costs economics (TCE) issues in FA offshore outsourcing using a case study of the Malaysia outsourcing industry which is growing and experiencing significant change.

This study uses a qualitative case study approach. Interviews cover several foreign firms, which are based in Malaysia and involved in FA offshore outsourcing services worldwide. Interviews also include related regulatory bodies in Malaysia.

Using TCE and management control theoretical framework, findings indicate issues and challenges faced by the firms and the need for contract management skills to mitigate the issues.

This study is limited to a broad discussion of FA offshore outsourcing, TCE and contract management but it could be a basis for future studies on specific issues of managing attrition in FA offshore outsourcing. This study contributes to prior works in TCE and FA offshore outsourcing by establishing controls to minimise costs at contact, contract and control stage. Specifically, this study emphasises contract management such as negotiating contract and using long‐term contractual arrangement.

This study not only identifies TCE issues in offshore FA outsourcing, but also provides suggestions for minimising transaction costs. For example, firms should consider the type of transaction costs involved and plan for appropriate contract management to mitigate the costs.

There is no study yet that discusses in‐depth the issues of TCE in FA offshore outsourcing especially in Malaysia and the need for contract management in mitigating such issues.

The purpose of this paper is first, to investigate the effective governance structure in early stage of offshore business process outsourcing (BPO), especially in the case where service provider's language is different from client's language, and second, to explore some of the conditions at the adoption of BPO that are likely to influence the shape of the governance structure.

Ground theory building methodology that builds theory in a grounded and inductive fashion is used for this study. First, a genetic framework to analyze offshore BPO governance structure is derived from extant literature. Then, the framework is applied to an exploratory case analysis to explore an effective form of the governance mechanism.

The hybrid governance structure consists of inter‐organizational coordination mechanisms, inter‐organizational systems and social control. Companies that wish to offshore their business process should select the service providers that can facilitate setting up such hybrid governance structure.

As offshore BPO is expected to be booming in the next few years, this study helps both academics and practitioners to understand the effective governance structure of offshore BPO.

This paper aims to present a managerial framework that facilitates successful supplier selection and ongoing management for purchasing services from offshore suppliers.

This research is grounded in transaction cost theory and developed using data from case studies of six Fortune 500 firms that have a minimum of three years experience purchasing services from suppliers located in India.

Viewing the selection and management of suppliers for the purchase of offshore outsourced services as strategic in nature helps organizations ensure quality and low cost in the service delivery and also reduces complexity and associated risk to the organization.

The overarching limitation is the number and size of the companies being researched.

This research presents a framework to guide managers in reducing risk and improving performance in these complex service purchases. Formalizing the selection and management of offshore outsourced services and investing in supplier improvements/measurement was found to improve operating relationships and enhance the business‐to‐business relationship.

This research provides a supply management perspective on a relatively new phenomenon. There has been little academic research on business process offshoring and few theoretical insights to guide managers in the purchase of services from suppliers located in different geographies with different cultures and operating structures. This paper looks at this phenomenon from a US‐based perspective and provides guidelines for managers.

The purpose of this study is to develop a research agenda on internal controls for offshored accounting processes. It further develops a linkage between internal controls of offshored accounting processes and auditing of the organization. Offshoring of accounting processes has become a common business practice, pursued by firms to reduce costs and focus on core competencies. However, our understanding about internal controls of these offshored processes is limited.

Grounded in theory that is supported by prior literature and interviews with practitioners, this paper attempts to develop a research agenda on internal controls for offshored accounting processes.

The main findings of our study suggest that while offshoring saves costs and allows the clients to focus on their core competencies, it also poses risks to the clients’ organizations. To mitigate these risks and comply with the regulatory requirements of the countries where the clients are located, clients and their offshore vendors need to effectively establish adequate internal controls for offshored business processes. Clients should seek those vendors who have appropriate processes in place and are willing to provide Service Organization Control (SOC) reports (or at least are capable of getting a SOC report in the near future). Moreover, clients should avoid offshoring the processes that would exist in defective internal control systems. Similarly, vendors should avoid undertaking those processes for which they are incapable of maintaining efficient internal controls.

Our study has implications for academicians as well as practitioners on understanding the determinants and consequences of internal control for offshored processes.

While internal controls for offshored accounting process and related regulatory changes have been increasingly important topics, little research has been devoted to explore their implications on accounting and auditing literature. We attempt to bridge this gap by synthesizing prior research on internal controls and auditing, and further developing a set of research questions for academic research. Our hope is to spur a new area of research that has not been explored before.

This study aims to compare the impact of Australian onshore and offshore immigration detention centres (IDCs) on detainees’ health and health-care events.

It uses data extracted from the Australian Government’s quarterly health reports from 2014 to 2017. These reports contain a range of data about the health and well-being of detainees, including complaints/presenting symptoms and number of appointments and hospitalisations. To compare onshore and offshore data sets, the authors calculated the rate of health events per quarter against the estimated quarterly onshore and offshore detention population. They ran a series of two-proportion z-tests for each matched quarter to calculate median z- and p-values for all quarters. These were used as an indicator as to whether the observed differences between onshore and offshore events were statistically significant.

The results suggest that adults detained onshore and offshore have substantial health needs, however, almost all rates were far higher in offshore detention, with people more likely to raise a health-related complaint, access health services and be prescribed medications, often at two to three times the rate of those onshore.

This paper adds to a modest body of literature that explains the health of people detained in Australian IDCs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explore health service utilisation and a range of other variables found in the Australian Government’s quarterly health reports. These findings bolster the evidence which suggests that detention, and particularly offshore detention is particularly harmful to health.

This paper aims to focus on the relationships between the levels of knowledge and the type of knowledge transfer approaches, and the relationships between the types of knowledge and the knowledge transfer approaches which were adopted in a study of knowledge transfer from a US‐based technical support center to an offshore support center in China.

The research was conducted as an interpretive case study. Three techniques (i.e. document review, participant observation, and semi‐structured interviews) were employed for data collection in the field.

The findings indicate that the lower the level of recipient absorptive and retentive capacity, the more difficulty the recipient will have in acquiring tacit and complex types of knowledge, and the more formal structured knowledge transfer approach the recipient will need to adopt. The results identify that “structured transfer stages” was used by novices to transfer embrained and encoded knowledge, while “unstructured copy” was widely adopted by advanced beginners to transfer encoded and embodied knowledge, “unstructured adaptation” was mainly utilized by those at the competence level to transfer embodied and embedded knowledge, and “unstructured fusion” was preferred by recipients at the proficiency level to transfer embodied and embedded knowledge as well.

The findings contribute to an understanding of the knowledge transfer processes required when US‐based firms outsource business processes to offshore countries with significantly different cultural contexts. The findings also reflect the testing of possible analytical structures for understanding the processes of knowledge transfer, and the mechanisms for knowledge transfer in a cross‐cultural business context.

The paper provides new insights into the knowledge transfer process for different levels of knowledge acquisition in a cross‐cultural business context.

Offshoring is a common practice to operationalize global business strategies. Data protection and privacy assurance are major concerns in such international arrangements. This paper aims to examine the strategy adopted to ensure privacy assurance in offshoring arrangements.

This is a literature review to understand privacy assurance strategies adopted in offshoring arrangements and an exploratory case study of captive offshoring arrangement with onshore location in Canada and offshoring locations in India and Philippines. A comparative analysis of the privacy laws and privacy principles of Canada, Philippines and India has been done.

It was found that at the time of migration of process or work to the offshore location, organizations follow a conformist privacy strategy; however, once in business as usual mode, they follow entrepreneur privacy strategy. Privacy impact assessment (PIA) was found to be an important element in resolving the “administrative problem” of an offshoring organization’s privacy assurance strategy.

The core privacy principles are outlined in the PIA templates; however, the current templates are designed to meet the conformist strategy and may need to be revised to include the cultural aspects, training, audit and information security requirements to plan and deliver on the entrepreneur strategy.

Offshoring organizations can benefit by planning for entrepreneur privacy assurance strategy at the inception stage. Enhancements to PIA templates to facilitate the same have been suggested.

Privacy assurance strategy followed by organizations while offshoring has been examined. This paper suggests extending the PIA process so that it covers privacy assurance requirements in offshoring arrangements. The learnings can be used in managing privacy assurance requirements in similar multi-country offshore arrangements.