Organizational Outsourcing Readiness : Empirically Investigating the Role of Client’s IT Capability, Knowledge, and Alignment for Outsourcing Success

How can prospective outsourcing clients prepare their internal organizational workflows to meet the challenges associated with an outsourcing venture with little penalty in time, cost, and effort? Along this guiding question, the author empirically investigates the ways in which several factors of the client company''s internal organizational context affect the outcomes of their outsourcing efforts. The investigated factors represent the client''s IT capability, the explicit knowledge in form of business process documentation available within the company, and the level of alignment between the client''s IT and business domains. Based on qualitative and quantitative empirical data, S. F. Martin demonstrates that each of these client-specific factors has a significant inter-organizational impact, affecting the quality of the relationship between client and provider, the vendor’s performance, and outsourcing success.