this information is then used to determine a firm’s optimal rate of It outsourcing. a key finding of this research involves the optimality of two extreme strategies. the authors find that clients should either totally outsource or totally insource their business processes, based on how rapidly their knowledge of how to best coordinate their operations depreciates. they also show that partial outsourcing decisions are appropriate when the client is able to acquire operational process knowledge from the outsourcing services vendor. With papers such as this, we see the new insights that are beginning to emerge from the IS discipline’s efforts to help define the emerging area of services science [5, 18, 24]. the Special Section closes with a paper titled “the unified Procurement Strategy for Enterprise Software: a test of the ‘Move to the Middle’ hypothesis,” by robert J. Kauffman and Juliana Y. tsai. the authors explore the predictions of the “move to the middle” hypothesis of clemons et al.