Knowledge Sharing in ICT-Outsourcing Relationships

This paper discusses knowledge sharing in ICT outsourcing relationships. The ICT outsourcing literature focuses primarily on large organizations’ and with an underlying assumption that ICT outsourcing takes place when a large organization outsources an internal IT-department, IT-system or IT-function. In recent years there has been a change in this, and today ICT outsourcing has a broader meaning. A trend is the growth of the use of outsourcing in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With the use of ICT outsourcing in SMEs’ knowledge sharing gets a new dimension. The paper focuses on this “new” ICT outsourcing perspective, where the outsourcers do not have knowledge about the business in the hiring organization at the beginning of the relationship. Within this subject there are at least two areas that are interesting: why share knowledge and how share it? The paper gives a short description of knowledge, knowledge management systems, and ICT outsourcing. In addition, the paper discusses the difficulties in knowledge sharing in ICT outsourcing relationships. Finally, the paper handles three more questions: Why share knowledge? What knowledge should be shared? And, how to share knowledge?