Bringing IT Back Home: Developing Capacity for Change

IT outsourcing is a common means of meeting internal organizational IT needs today. Gartner Dataquest estimated that worldwide IT outsourcing will grow to $255 billion in 2008. Perhaps surprisingly, given its popularity, IT outsourcing has a high failure rate. When outsourcing relationships fail, organizations are forced to make costly changes to their sourcing strategy. One strategy is to bring the outsourced IT components back into the organizations and rebuild the entire IT department. The challenge is, how should organizations reabsorb these outsourced IT components to build the internal IT department? What types of capabilities do organizations need to develop or acquire to ensure a successful backsourcing process? This paper focuses on addressing the issue of IT backsourcing following a failed outsourcing relationship. It aims at explaining how organizations develop and acquire ‘capacity for change’ to facilitate the backsourcing process. The value of the study lies in the identification of useful strategies that facilitate the development of ‘capacity for change’. These strategies serve as best practices for future backsourcing efforts

Formation and Operation of a Blogging Community: A Structurational Perspective

Blogging is popular. It has emerged as a formidable phenomenon that not only draws massive daily following but also shifts the paradigm of human interaction. As a new communication genre, blogging has no specific governing bodies to manage the entity. This raises interesting questions on how is a blogging community being formed and how does it function. Founded on Structuration Theory, this paper applies the concepts of structure and agency as well as signification, legitimation, and domination to explain the formation and operation of a blogging community. The framework is valuable in serving as the basis for understanding how rules and practices are produced and reproduced to govern smooth functioning and operation of a virtual blogging community

Examining IT Outsourcing Service Continuance: An Expectation-Confirmation Model

This is a research-in-progress paper that examines clients’ decision to continue engaging their current IT outsourcing vendors. It employs the lens of expectation-confirmation theory to evaluate how prior expectation relates to the evaluation of actual vendor performance, how expectation-confirmation influences client satisfaction, and how it leads to the decision of outsourcing service (dis)continuance. The theory suggests that positive confirmation and positive disconfirmation lead to client satisfaction and higher probability of outsourcing service continuance while negative disconfirmation leads to dissatisfaction and service discontinuance. Formation of expectation is a dynamic process as clients continuously updating their expectations based on new experiences. When performing expectation-confirmation evaluation, clients may refer to new expectations that are not present prior to relationship engagement but are formed during the course of the relationship

Understanding IT Backsourcing Decision

Even though outsourcing is a popular means of meeting internal IT needs, press reports and statistics suggest that the decision to backsource is becoming increasingly common. Some organizations backsource upon expiration of contracts; others terminate existing contracts to implement backsourcing. In both cases, organizations incur high rebuilding fees and expensive contract termination fees. Still, many choose to incur these expenses and undergo the trouble of internalizing the once-outsourced functions. This makes backsourcing decision an interesting strategic turnaround. A review of existing literature shows that backsourcing decision has received little attention. This paper examines factors that motivate the decision to backsource. Based on four case studies, contributing factors to backsourcing decision are compared and contrasted. The findings suggest that organizations backsource to correct existing problems and to harvest new business opportunities. Specifically, when outsourcing contracts fail to meet expectations, organizations backsource to rebuild internal IT capabilities. Organizations also backsource when changes occur to their strategic goals, organizational structure, and IT role. Changes from external business environment such as mergers and alliance formation also contribute to backsourcing decision

Understanding business intelligence adoption and its values : some examples from Malaysian companies

Business intelligence (BI) has become increasingly important to organizations in supporting business decision making and in achieving competitive advantage. Often, cases of BI adoption mentioned in the press are those from developed countries such as USA, Australia, and Germany. Seldom are adoption stories from developing countries such as Malaysia being reported. This paper intends to highlight a few BI adoption cases among Malaysian companies from various industries. The goal is to underscore (1) the way these companies make use of different BI capabilities, and (2) the values of BI to the companies. By doing so, it is hoped that more Malaysian companies, regardless of size, will become aware of BI and will adopt and adapt the tools as catalysts to support their businesses

Why Do I Choose to Stay with My Current Company: A Job Embeddedness Model of ‘Stay’ Factors among IT Employees in Outsourcing Industry

This research-in-progress paper examines factors that influence IT employees‟ decision to continue staying with their current jobs and hence their current companies (i.e., vendor organizations in IT outsourcing industry). It employs the lens of Job Embeddedness Model (JEM) that posits employees‟ decision to stay with a job is influenced by a matrix of two embedded dimensions (i.e., on-the-job embeddedness and off-the-job embeddedness) and three embedded elements (i.e., fit, link, and sacrifice). Each element in the matrix was examined using a qualitative case study method. In a labor-intensive environment such as that of the IT outsourcing industry, retaining skilled and talented employees is important because these employees are sources of competitive advantage. If they leave, loses in the forms of human, knowledge, and social capital can be so substantial that it affects the operations of both vendors and their clients. Through understanding of factors that bind employees to their current organizations, effective retention programs can be formulated to keep the best IT employees productively engaged for a long-term

An Empirical Examination Of The Use Of Mobile Technology—A Social Pressure Perspective

Mobile technology has been predicted to create new challenges and competitions to organizations. To business decision makers, the understanding of mobile technology would then become critical in helping organizations to better manage relevant technological issues. The theoretical analysis and empirical examination of mobile phenomenon, however, remain scarce. In addition, conventional wisdom tends to emphasize the economic aspect of information technology. Such emphasis, nonetheless, lacks the explanatory power to understand social factors of the use of technologies. Social aspects of technologies could significantly influence the success of adoption. Derived from institutional theory, which emphasizes the influence of social pressures on collective members’ isomorphic behavior, the paper proposes how three different social pressures—coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures would positively influence a group member’s use of mobile technology. Our findings suggest that the influence of social pressures on the use of mobile technology might be contingent upon the types of technologies. While normative pressure is positively related to the use of cellular phones, coercive and mimetic pressures are significant to the use of laptops. Business decision makers might thus employ various strategies to create certain social pressure and in turn promote the use of corresponding mobile technologies

Effective knowledge transfer when changing IS sourcing strategy

Ensuring successful knowledge transfer when embarking on IS sourcing strategy change is critical to ensure service quality and continuity, and organizational IS capability development.Managing the process, however, is complex and challenging.It involves the sharing and learning of technical IS and business knowledge.It also involves knowledge flows across organizational/national boundaries where members operate in completely different industrial, business, and cultural environments.This paper focuses on identifying a set of effective knowledge transfer strategy when changing existing IS sourcing arrangement. Experiences learned from the case study presented here serve as exemplary guidelines for those changing IS sourcing strategy