Signals foretelling the ending of an IT sourcing strategic partnership

Although IT sourcing strategic partnerships provide various advantages to the co-operating partners, realising these advantages is not self-evident. The high level of uncertainty of an IT context and their long duration make them vulnerable to a premature ending. Neglecting the possibility of such an ending may confront the partners of an IT strategic partnership with high negative consequences. Therefore, it is surprising that partnership ending and the governance of partnership ending have received relatively little attention in the existing literature. Around the beginning of the new millennium a small stream on this topic, in which Tähtinen plays a prominent role, has emerged. However, the discussions in this stream are very much at a conceptual level and seem to have stopped without a conclusive ending. Arguably, it is too difficult to develop a conclusive theoretical framework up-front matching all kinds of practical observations. Therefore, we plea for a more empirically grounded local approach. In such an approach, for a specific partnership, the signals which revealed a possible ending will be collected through a set of interviews with interviewees involved in the specific partnership. By combining these signals a more complete and pluriform picture of the ending of a specific partnership can be acquired. If such an exercise for sufficient IT sourcing strategic partnerships’ endings will be done, hopefully science will be in a better position to generate generic theories from these gathered local theories. At the time of the writing we are conducting first experiments with several IT sourcing strategic partnerships which recently faced or are facing a premature ending. We hope to report our progress on a future conference event soon.