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The chapter presents case evidence to argue that rather than comprising noncore, back-office business support services, shared service centers (SSCs), when viewed from a knowledge management perspective, can create both valuable and firm-specific resources and dynamic capabilities.

Literatures in strategic management, knowledge management, and business process sourcing are drawn on as a prelude to a longitudinal case study conducted by the authors in a large private sector utility company.

A knowledge management perspective demonstrates how the SSCs, as a hybrid organizational form, may help to redefine core versus noncore activities and thus, to play a role in the creation and protection of firm-specific resource and dynamic capabilities.

The SSC model is an emerging phenomenon and the field work is restricted to a single case study. Further field research is suggested.

The findings should be useful to those organizations embarking on the reconfiguration of back-office support services which might gain from further consideration of what activities might be seen as constituting core enterprise architecture. The case study demonstrates that when the traditional core activities of the organization become commoditized over time, a core competence becomes the management and administration of a bundle of technical projects premised on the processes and information systems of the SSC.

Shared services is an emerging phenomena and scholar literature is nascent. The chapter explores potential benefits of the SSC model beyond the headline agenda of cost reduction through efficiency savings and labor arbitrage.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the organizational reconfiguration of offshoring on firms’ strategies. A consequence of offshoring is the need to reintegrate the geographically relocated organizational activities into a coherent organizational architecture. In order to do this, firms need a high degree of architectural knowledge, which is typically gained through learning by doing. We therefore argue that firms with more offshoring experience are more likely to include organizational objectives in their offshoring strategies. We develop and find support for this hypothesis using a mixed-method approach based on a qualitative case study and comprehensive data from the Offshoring Research Network. These findings contribute to research on the organizational design and architecture of offshoring and the dynamics of organizational architectures.

We investigate the effects of technological capabilities on firms’ survival chances during market-fusing technological change. Our context is the matured U.S. machine tool industry. During the period of our study, 1975 through 1995, a drastic shift in demand conditions prompted the buyers of machine tools to demand more versatile products to improve their productivity. The advent of microprocessors enabled manufacturers to meet these demands by combining the functions of previously distinctive products. As a result, market segments fused and machine tool manufacturers in once disparate product categories came into direct competition with one another. We propose that incumbents with broader component and architectural capabilities will be better able to adapt to and hence survive market-fusing technological change. Our results, based on a panel data set of U.S. machine tool incumbents, support the value of broad component capabilities but reveal no adaptive advantage of architectural capabilities.