Strategic Partnerships in the IT Sector: Trust, Power and Inter- Organizational Collaboration

With an ever-increasing number of companies outsourcing their information systems’ operations, issues associated with the establishment and management of collaborative relationships have attracted considerable recent interest. In particular, a good deal of attention has been directed towards the role that power plays in collaborative relationships and, specifically, to methods of distinguishing between true cooperation and collaboration and the exercise of power dressed up as collaboration. Many aspects of power do lend themselves to quantification and this enables the development of models of collaborative relationships that can be employed for both descriptive and predictive purposes. In our paper, we present a model of this type: a model derived (in part) from a current study of collaborative relationships within the Australian communications industry. Our work to date suggests that a much more fine-grained analysis than is usual must be undertaken if the type of inter-organizational interface that is conducive to engendering trust is to be established.