More and more banks are deciding to merge business activities like payment processing or loans administration by founding joint transaction banks or credit factories. But under which circumstances will banks decide to outsource certain activities? What are the relevant drivers and inhibitors? What is the role of externalities and how can stable coalitions be established? What are the resulting market structure effects of cooperative sourcing activities?

Based on the integration of relevant economic and organizational theories, Daniel Beimborn develops a formal model of cooperative sourcing. The model captures the different drivers and inhibitors like economies of scale, scope and skill, transaction costs, strategic constraints etc. and forms the basis for both game-theoretical analyses and agent-based simulations. Simulations help to handle the numerical complexity and allow for compound analyses of the causes and effects of cooperative sourcing. Empirical data from two large-scale surveys and case studies in the German credit business are used in order to feed the simulation model and to validate the results.

This book is essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of business and information systems. It is also of interest to executives in the area of information systems and outsourcing.

Its originality, its attention to detail, its level of sophistication, its comprehensiveness, its coherence, and its richness makes this an excellent example of what the IS field needs far more of: applied research which ties together the best of what academics can offer with sound practical results.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Rudy Hirschheim
Baton Rouge, September 8, 2007

Autorentext
Dr. Daniel Beimborn promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Wolfgang König am Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik an der Universität Frankfurt am Main. Er ist als Wissenschaftlicher Assistent von Prof. Dr. Tim Weitzel an der Universität Bamberg tätig.

Zusammenfassung
Foreword Make or buy? The question about optimal sourcing is one of the oldest and most central questions of managerial economics. Consequently, the question about IT outsourcing has been an important research topic of the Information Systems discipline for the past two decades. The financial services industry also has a long tradition in IT outsourcing (ITO) with IT representing, besides people, the only production facility of banks. The cost structure of non-physical pr- ucts and services in the financial services sector relies heavily on fixed costs and, thus, holds high potential for the inter-organizational bundling of processes and achieving cost savings from economies of scale and skill. In this book, Dr. Beimborn advances the traditional academic view on IT outsourcing towards a sourcing network perspective. The complexity in this paradigm, which adds to the complexity of the traditional outsourcing research perspective and, furthermore, generalizes it to a business process outsourcing (BPO) perspective, consists in the fact that typically more than two parties will negotiate and that the roles of insourcer and outsourcer are not necessarily p- defined in advance. It is striking that in the otherwise generally mature outsou- ing literature the sourcing network issue has been almost completely ignored so far.

Inhalt
Theoretical Foundation and Related Research.- Cooperative Sourcing in the Banking Industry.- Developing a Formal Model for Cooperative Sourcing.- Analytical and Simulative Studies.- Conclusion.