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Within an IT outsourcing relationship, transition represents a critical and complex phase that starts immediately after contract signing. Transition involves handing over outsourced activities from client firm to service provider firm and accompanies a new way of operating. The purpose of this paper is to determine and detail factors influencing the performance of transition phase within global IT outsourcing relationships.

In this paper, the authors present a framework for transition performance that includes four factors: transition planning, knowledge transfer, transition governance and retained organization. This framework is tested and enriched by utilizing a single, in‐depth case study involving over 25 interviews with a global offshore IT outsourcing engagement.

It was found that knowledge transfer and transition governance are more critical factors than transition planning and retained organization for transition performance. This was due mainly to two reasons: the critical challenges faced, within the scope of these factors, had higher potential to disrupt transition; and both these factors and their related issues required a significant joint and coordinated effort from client and service provider firms, thereby, making implementation challenging for transition.

Practitioners have suggested that over two‐thirds of failed outsourcing relationships are due to transition‐related challenges. This paper represents one of the first in‐depth studies that provides insights from a real‐life global outsourcing engagement, which contributes to and complements existing literature on IT outsourcing by providing a greater understanding of transition. Furthermore, it provides practitioners with insights and best practices that can be used to guide transitions in real‐life engagements.

To identify key lessons, trends and enduring challenges with global outsourcing of back office services.

The authors extract lessons, project trends, and discuss enduring challenges from a 20 year research program conducted by these authors and their extended network of co‐authors and colleagues.

The authors identify seven important lessons for successfully exploiting the maturing Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) markets. The lessons require back office executives to build significant internal capabilities and processes to manage global outsourcing. The authors predict 13 trends about the size and growth of ITO and BPO markets, about suppliers located around the world, and about particular sourcing models including application service provision, insourcing, nearshoring, rural sourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, freelance outsourcing, and captive centers. The authors identify five persistent, prickly issues on global outsourcing pertaining to back office alignment, client and supplier incentives, knowledge transfer, knowledge retention, and sustainability of outsourcing relationships.

The authors present some experimental innovations to address these issues.

Agile methods have considerably transformed project management. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of agile (as compared to plan-driven) methods on customer satisfaction in the context of knowledge-intensive business services.

This study uses a survey examining the experiences of 361 customers with different outsourced software projects in Switzerland and a regression-based model to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that agile approaches can lead to higher customer satisfaction than plan-driven approaches, but the impact size is not as substantial as expected. The effect does not depend on the number of specification changes.

Managers must be aware that merely switching from a plan driven to an agile approach will not lead to substantial improvement in customer satisfaction. Satisfaction with the process is a more important driver of overall customer satisfaction than satisfaction with the service outcome. Thus, providers of knowledge-intensive services should train their employees in recognizing the importance of the cooperation process.

So far, the positive impact of agile methods is often only based on anecdotal evidence as well as on surveys examining the supplier perspective. This study provides support for the positive impact of agile methods on customer satisfaction, an important response variable from a marketing perspective, which has not been examined before in the context considered here.

The purpose of this research was to uncover perceptions of information technology outsourcing (ITO) project leaders and project teams regarding knowledge transfer between client and vendor partners during opening and closing transition phases of ITO projects.

Qualitative methods and exploratory case study design were used. Purposeful sampling was used to identify ITO knowledge assets including project team members and organizational documents and artifacts that may provide information regarding the knowledge transfer processes during the transition phases of the ITO project. Sample criteria were ITO project team members from one US-based client organization and the company’s international vendor partners. The study population included project managers, analyst, developers, subject matter experts (SMEs) and other ITO knowledge workers involved in the ITO project from one US-based organization. Interview and document analysis were done using of NVivo Pro 11^® research software.

Four themes emerged from participant responses relative to the opening and closing phases of ITO projects including KT approaches to plans and processes; KT dependencies relative to IT project team member’s reliance on project tools, processes and artifacts; determinants of KT success or failure relative to project team members’ perceptions; and role of documentation relative to communication and distribution of KT outcomes.

This research may provide insights into additional aspects of knowledge transfer during ITO transition phases, which may be used by IT leaders and project teams to plan for successful knowledge transfer during the transition phases of ITO projects.

Advances in information technology coupled with the need to build resilience against disruptions by pandemics like COVID-19 continue to emphasize offshoring services in the software industry. Service-level agreements (SLAs) have served as a key mechanism for safeguarding against risk in offshore service arrangements. Yet, variations in service cost and quality persist. This study aims to open up the blackbox linking SLAs to offshore project outcomes by examining (1) how the provisions in these contracts affect the ability of project teams – the work unit primarily in charge of producing the offshored service – to achieve their objectives and fulfill client requirements and (2) how differences in contextual factors shape the effects of these provisions.

The authors incorporate the role of organizational work practice differences to understand the challenges that 270 offshore project teams faced in coordinating and integrating technical and business domain knowledge across organizational boundaries in offshore arrangements. The examined offshore IT projects were managed by a leading software vendor in India and several of its US-based clients over a three-year period.

The authors demonstrate that organizational work practice differences represent a barrier to offshore project success, and that project team transition processes are an important mechanism for overcoming these barriers. Moreover, the authors find that transition processes represent key mediating mechanisms through which SLA provisions affect offshore project outcomes.

The study findings shed light on how SLAs shape software project teams' balance between activities aimed at meeting client needs and those aimed at containing costs.

The paper seeks to explore the extent of involvement of management accounting in strategic inter‐organizational decisions and control in the context of offshoring of services.

For the present study, a multiple case study field research design was selected. A data‐bank media search identified companies actually offshoring their services. In total, 17 semi‐structured interviews with management accountants/managers were conducted in 14 of the identified companies. The interviews were analyzed using content analysis techniques.

Management accounting is involved in offshoring activities to a much lower extent than expected. The reasons range from contractual agreements between the different parties, which substitute in part for management accounting interventions, to competence problems in accounting departments. Therefore, management accounting often fails to provide support for strategic planning and coordination.

The data obtained through the qualitative research approach have a low‐scaling level, which limits subsequent analysis to descriptive statistics only.

The paper identifies risks and actual problems associated with offshoring, which indicate an increased need for coordinated planning and information processing. Furthermore, it raises the question of how management accounting can overcome existing competence problems with respect to the support of strategic decision making, in order to fulfil its function within the company more efficiently.

Literature does not provide convincing evidence of the practical significance of management accounting in the context of strategic decisions and inter‐organizational relations. This paper shows that management accounting currently remains far removed from its function as a developer of strategic decisions and as a support function for corporate planning and coordination processes.

In times of open and distributed innovation, many innovation activities that are important for firms' products and services take place beyond the boundaries of the firm and thus beyond firms' direct control. A prime example for this phenomenon is open source software (OSS) development, where multiple actors contribute to a public good, which is also integrated into company-owned software products. Despite the importance of aligning community work on the public good with own in-house development efforts, firms have limited options to directly control the OSS project or the project's outcome. This research reflects on resource deployment control, a control mode in which firms assign own developers to work for an OSS project to influence the OSS project, and tests hypotheses on individual developer levels.

This research tests the effect of perceived resource deployment control on opinion leadership by analyzing employed Linux kernel developers.

The findings show that developers who perceive being assigned to an OSS project to enact control also exhibit opinion leadership. This research also investigates boundary conditions such as the OSS business model a firm operates and the reputation developers assign to the developers' employer.

This research is the first that is devoted to resource deployment control, and the research closes with a discussion of implications for control theory and the management of innovation beyond firm boundaries.

Companies are increasingly changing their IT sourcing arrangements. Such changes often involve significant costs. The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain IT sourcing as a dynamic organizational phenomenon and to gain a deeper understanding of the drivers and outcomes of IT sourcing changes at organizational level.

A qualitative approach with interpretive analysis of historical data. Data are collected from companies through interviews and review of public documents where available.

The underlying tendencies of change are either primarily associated with institutional processes, or with what we term “IT‐driven” considerations. The perceived success of IT outsourcing in companies is dependent on these underlying tendencies.

This is an exploratory study and the findings on the underlying tendencies in change will be helpful in further theory development and research on IT outsourcing changes.

Knowledge coming from such research could help companies make more effective decisions about IT sourcing changes and set realistic expectations.

The dynamic perspective taken in this paper is different from the perspectives taken in earlier research where the researchers took cross‐sectional views of IT outsourcing arrangements. This paper shows the importance of re‐examining the reasons for change using the more encompassing concept of orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to critically rethink the concepts and the theoretical foundations of IT governance in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).

The paper is based on multiple case studies. In total, eight cases of outsourced information system projects where failures occurred were selected. An outsourced information system failure (OISF) is suggested as a failure of governance of the IT in a SME environment. A structure for stating propositions derived from two competing theories is proposed (Agency Theory and Theory of Trust).

The results reveal that trust is slightly more important than control issues such as output‐based contracts and structured controls in the governance of IT in SMEs.

The world of SMEs is significantly different from that of large companies, and therefore, the concept of IT governance in SMEs needs reconsideration. For researchers and practitioners, it would be more meaningful to focus on actual, working SMEs instead of on a version of their activities derived from those of large companies.

The paper offers two contributions. First, it elaborates the limited research on IT in SMEs and second, it brings theoretical foundations for their IT governance. The value of IT governance in SMEs is explained.

This paper investigates the integration of leadership training into IT curricula to develop current and future skills needed by the IT job market. The technical and non-technical skills required for IT professionals are presented and a conceptual model for including leadership training in technical courses is outlined. To implement this model, we adopted the Problem-Based Learning approach to teach an IT course. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered, through a survey, from 52 undergraduate students in the College of Information Technology at Zayed University. Our results show that our adopted approach was successful in teaching IT skills as well as developing leadership skills. Given these findings, we highlight the importance and feasibility of integrating leadership development on a daily basis within technical courses to develop both the technical and non technical skills required by the job market.