Start Date

16-8-2018 12:00 AM

Description

As information technology in private and public organizations continues to gain importance, IT outsourcing (ITO) has become a critical component of corporate strategy for many institutions. Consequently, substantial research has investigated topics around ITO decisions, outcomes, and contractual governance. Despite decades of academic research, however, quantitative analyses of key contract features are still scarce. By applying three statistical lenses on a dataset of more than 1,000 ITO deals from the ASG region, we shed light on three pivotal ITO contract characteristics. Our findings are twofold: Contextually, they point to declining contract lengths and run rates, identify significant influence factors on contract value, contract length, and pricing method, and show high prediction rates in binary classification of pricing method and contract value. Methodically, they serve as a proof of concept for IS theory building by applying quantitative mixed-method approaches to similar datasets with global scope and additional variables.

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Aug 16th, 12:00 AM

Analyzing Influences on Pivotal ITO Contract Features: A Quantitative Multi-Study Design with Evidence from Western Europe

As information technology in private and public organizations continues to gain importance, IT outsourcing (ITO) has become a critical component of corporate strategy for many institutions. Consequently, substantial research has investigated topics around ITO decisions, outcomes, and contractual governance. Despite decades of academic research, however, quantitative analyses of key contract features are still scarce. By applying three statistical lenses on a dataset of more than 1,000 ITO deals from the ASG region, we shed light on three pivotal ITO contract characteristics. Our findings are twofold: Contextually, they point to declining contract lengths and run rates, identify significant influence factors on contract value, contract length, and pricing method, and show high prediction rates in binary classification of pricing method and contract value. Methodically, they serve as a proof of concept for IS theory building by applying quantitative mixed-method approaches to similar datasets with global scope and additional variables.