Information Technology Outsourcing: Economic, Societal, and Process Drivers

Information technology outsourcing (ITO) can have benefits, such as lowering costs, increasing access to resources, enhancing innovation, and shortening product development times. This paper presents an overview of ITO activities during the period 2010–2023 and gives insight into the direction of ITO activities for the foreseeable future. The authors drew on an extremely limited set of literature that provided very little guidance, and they relied rather on in-depth interviews with executives at the five largest banks in South Africa. The research indicates that ITO has declined over the last decade in South Africa. The reasons most frequently cited were cost savings that have not fully materialized; societal factors and socioeconomic trends, such as unemployment; and the advent of Agile and DevOps methodologies. The authors see a definite move underway towards more cloud-based hosting and foresee the acceleration of infrastructure outsourcing in the near future. The authors apply a morphogenetic change framework to describe the causal mechanism over this period.