Sourcing IT Skills in Organizations: A Comparison Among European Countries.

Organizations deal with the matter of sourcing and governing their IT skills. This paper provides insights how this is done by firms in different European countries. It addresses the insourcing/outsourcing of IT skills trade-off, and explores the effects of country characteristics. Analyses are based on 1,464 companies extracted from the E-business W@tch dataset, covering two distinct industries in eight European countries around the year 2003. It appears that European organizations, then, marginally recruited IT personnel on the external labour market (insourcing). Instead, outsourcing and allocating IT training were more popular as a sourcing policy. Also, it appeared that different policies to attain IT skills do not coincide. Sourcing policies significantly vary between countries, taken industry and size effects into account. Suggestions for interpreting these variations between companies and countries are put forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]