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Institutional Change and the Role of Advisory Services in Strategic Information Technology Outsourcing: A Revelatory Case Study

Information technology outsourcing (ITO) continues to be a topic both in research and industry. Many organizations strive to achieve strategic benefits such as major cost reductions or a more flexible IT with such strategic ITO projects. Although the client-vendor relationship has been identified as one of the key drivers for successful ITO engagements, strategic ITO projects with its dynamic processes have rarely been studied as a comprehensive whole. More and more clients tend to use support from a third-party advisory service to increase the changes for a positive outsourcing outcome, which increases the complexity even further. This short paper proposes to investigate how third-party advisors support clients and vendors in strategic ITO projects, and their impact on institutional changes for the client’s organization. We conduct an exploratory, longitudinal case study of a strategic ITO project with a triangular setup. For the data analysis, we unpack the complexity of such dynamic situations with the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework as our theoretical lens. The findings of our study result in a deeper understanding of strategic ITO projects and their impact on institutional changes, especially as regards the relationship between client and vendor. The analysis contains elements such as involved parties (here: client, vendor, and third-party advisor), the interactions, the project outcomes, and external influences of the ITO project. We propose to evaluate how third-party advisors have a positive respectively negative effect on the interactions between the client and vendor organization as well as on the outcomes of the ITO project.