Boundary spanning by design: Insights from a vendor perspective

Abstract

IT Outsourcing (ITO) relationship management has long been a challenging issue. Past research has been devoted to four main mechanisms, namely contract management, partnership management, organizational control and boundary spanning. Whereas the first three mechanisms have attracted much attention, the study on boundary spanning remains scant, adopting only the client perspective and overlooking the vendor. In this study, we fill that gap by studying the boundary-spanning practice of two ITO vendors. The data collection and analysis are guided by a creative and sound theoretical lens - the alignment between boundary-spanning capability and boundary-spanning strategy. Two by-design models were thus derived. The alignment-form model depicts the outlook of alignment, and the aligning-path model depicts the process of achieving alignment. The study complements the ITO literature by providing a more complete picture of boundary spanning and provides practitioners, especially vendors, with specific guidelines on how to span boundaries.