Coordination in the Remote Delivery of Services

How do organizations coordinate interdependent activities across geographic distance? We analyze 121 surveys of offshored processes to understand both the sources of difficulty in the remote delivery of services as well as how organizations overcome these difficulties. We find that contrary to conventional wisdom, system dependence of a process is a much greater hindrance to the offshoring service delivery than process stickiness. We also find that firms could overcome system dependence by either investing in generating common ground across locations to coordinate over interdependence. However, our findings indicate that investing in modularity or in facilitating ongoing communication across locations does not lead to coordination across geographic distance. We find differences between simple and complex processes on the use of these coordination mechanisms.