Governing an Unexpected Potential Ending of a Strategic IT Sourcing Partnership: Picking up the Right Signals

While IT sourcing partnerships are an appropriate instrument for developing effective IT “solutions” in an efficient way, they also face high uncertainty. This uncertainty could unexpectedly lead to situations in which the legitimacy of an IT-sourcing partnership may be questioned and therefore make a premature ending of the partnership a serious option. However, properly coping with an unexpected potential ending of a partnership is often not easy. A decision to end may be taken too early or too late, and partners who are unprepared for an ending may be caught off guard and be confronted with high costs in legal fees, time and effort. Remarkably enough, this topic has not received a lot of attention in both practice and in literature. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to review the literature about this underexplored topic of governance of unexpected potential endings of IT sourcing partnerships and to use the findings of six explorative case studies to identify the boundaries of the knowledge of this topic and to acquire ideas on how to further our understanding on this topic. We argue that signaling theory provides a useful ontology to discover the mechanics in which partnerships evolve. By rigorously and systematically studying ending signals in numerous actual partnerships probably patterns could be identified which “announce” a potential ending. Currently, we are in the process of setting up a specific signaling logging tool and are actively searching for actual partnerships willing to log and analyse their detected signals in quasi real time. We believe this research co-operation between researchers and practitioners is beneficial to both parties and may narrow the gap between them and will create a faster adoption of new insights as soon as they become available.