Objective and Structure
The objective of the forthcoming conference is to bring researchers in the field of IS (out)sourcing together once again, to exchange ideas and discuss current as well as past and future research projects. This year’s focus will be on Sourcing in the Era of Digital Agents. The conference is planned to be held in Mannheim, Germany. We hope the timing of the event is suitable since it is scheduled right after ECIS’2026, which will take place in Milan (Italy) from June 15-17, 2026. Mannheim lies in between Heidelberg and Frankfurt. It provides plenty of opportunities to visit major scenic places in Germany (e.g. the famous wine street), Austria, Switzerland, or Alsace, France.
It is again our intention to invite you and other key academic researchers who have published their research in the mainstream academic outlets on the topic of IS (out)sourcing and emerging sourcing topics in the era of digital agents, such as in the context of platform ecosystems, cloud computing, agentic services (i.e. bots), and agent augmentation to participate at ICOIS’2026. In order to provide a high degree of interaction and discussion among the conference participants, the meeting will be conducted in a workshop-like setting. As at our previous ICOIS events, we plan to complement our academic discussions with direct insights from practice by giving select industry representatives a voice via invited guest talks. As a registrant, you would be expected to attend the entire conference and actively engage in discussions. Each participant will be asked to speak for about 20 minutes and provide a paper based on her/his past, present or future research work on IS sourcing and emerging sourcing topics. Papers offering personal reflections on the history of IS outsourcing would also be welcomed. The papers will be considered for the 6th edition of the book published by Springer (if you wish). The feedback at the conference can be used to revise and strengthen the papers before they are published.
History of Conference
Few would doubt that IS sourcing has emerged as a key topic for both IS practitioners and academics. But when did academics notice the importance of this topic? It was in the early days of IS outsourcing research when Arjen Wassenaar, Markku Saaksjarvi and Rudy Hirschheim were inspired to put together the first academic Conference on Outsourcing of Information Systems Services (OUT’93) which took place in 1993 at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Since then, research on IS outsourcing has evolved rapidly. By 2001, over 100 academic papers, along with numerous doctoral dissertations had been published on IS outsourcing. This motivated us (Rudy Hirschheim, Armin Heinzl, and Jens Dibbern) to conduct the 2nd International Conference on Outsourcing of Information Services (ICOIS'2001) which was carried out at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Based on the papers presented at the conference in Bayreuth, a book entitled “Information Systems Outsourcing in the New Economy: Enduring Themes, Emergent Patterns and Future Directions” was published in 2002. Since then, IS outsourcing continued to be a topic of great contemporary importance. New sourcing trends such as offshoring, business process outsourcing (BPO) and backsourcing have emerged and are of great interest to academics and practitioners alike. To recognize these new trends, we put together a 2nd edition of the book in 2006 appearing under the title “Information Systems Outsourcing: Enduring Themes, new Perspectives, and Global Challenges”. We also felt the time was ripe to continue the conference tradition by running the 3rd International Conference on Outsourcing of Information Services (ICOIS'2007). This conference was again jointly organized by the three of us assisted by Jessica Winkler. We had a wonderful conference location at the Villa Bosch in Heidelberg. As a result of this conference, the 3rd edition of the book was published in 2009 under the title “Information Systems Outsourcing: Enduring Themes, Global Challenges, and Process Opportunities”. After a pause of another six years, in which the IS outsourcing research stream has continued to flourish, we held the conference again in 2013 in Mannheim (see ICOIS.de). This has led to the 4rd edition of the Springer edited book which was published in 2014 under the title “Information Systems Outsourcing: Towards Sustainable Business Value”. Continuing our six-year schedule, we then held the 5th ICOIS in 2019, again in Mannheim, resulting in the 5th edition entitled “Information Systems Outsourcing: The Era of Digital Transformation”. In ICOIS 2019 we have already noticed the increasing fusion of the topic of IS (out)souring with emergent forms of sourcing, including partnerships in platform ecosystems and sourcing tasks to bots and intelligent agents. Since 2019, new exciting developments have taken place, such as the growing application of intelligent agents—trends we aim to capture with ICOIS 2026.