Studying Multi-sourced IT Service Chain Arrangements - The Case of Mission Critical Outsourcing

Multi-sourcing as a strategy for IT outsourcing (ITO) is becoming more important. Although already identified in the early days of outsourcing, companies selected multiple providers for their IT services. The explicit management of these relations was left implicit both in practise and in research. Multi-sourcing has mostly been addressed as a competitive strategy, until now little attention has been paid to the collaboration between the parties and the evolution of the relationships. In this paper we investigate how to study successful multi-sourced IT service chain arrangements. In our approach we have conducted an exploratory case study of a successful Dutch specialist outsourcing provider for mission critical outsourcing. As an outcome of this case study we have developed a research framework to study the development of collaboration in relationships for multi-sourced IT service chains in the mission critical context.