Research Commentary ---Cooperation, Coordination, and Governance in Multisourcing: An Agenda for Analytical and Empirical Research

Ravi Bapna (), Anitesh Barua (), Deepa Mani () and Amit Mehra ()
Additional contact information
Ravi Bapna: Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, and Srini Raju Centre for IT and the Networked Economy, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad 500032, India
Anitesh Barua: McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78705
Deepa Mani: Indian School of Business, Hyderabad 500032, India
Amit Mehra: Indian School of Business, Hyderabad 500032, India

Information Systems Research, 2010, vol. 21, issue 4, 785-795

Abstract: Multisourcing, the practice of stitching together best-of-breed IT services from multiple, geographically dispersed service providers, represents the leading edge of modern organizational forms. While major strides have been achieved in the last decade in the information systems (IS) and strategic management literature in improving our understanding of outsourcing, the focus has been on a dyadic relationship between a client and a vendor. We demonstrate that a straightforward extrapolation of such a dyadic relationship falls short of addressing the nuanced incentive-effort-output linkages that arise when multiple vendors, who are competitors, have to cooperate and coordinate to achieve the client's business objectives. We suggest that when multiple vendors have to work together to deliver end-to-end services to a client, the choice of formal incentives and relational governance mechanisms depends on the degree of interdependence between the various tasks as well as the observability and verifiability of output. With respect to cooperation, we find that a vendor must not only put effort in a “primary” task it is responsible for but also cooperate through “helping” effort in enabling other vendors perform their primary tasks. In the context of coordination, we find that task redesign for modularity, OLAs, and governance structures such as the guardian vendor model represent important avenues for further research. Based on the analysis of actual multisourcing contract details over the last decade, interviews with leading practitioners, and a review of the single-sourcing literature, we lay a foundation for normative theories of multisourcing and present a research agenda in this domain.

Keywords: multisourcing; offshore outsourcing; cooperation; coordination; output verifiability; observability; relational governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.1100.0328 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:21:y:2010:i:4:p:785-795

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().