A study of the guardian vendor role in it multisourcing
Guide(s)
Bandi, Rajendra K
Department
Information Systems
Area
Information Systems
University
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Place
Bangalore
Publication Date
3-31-2022
Year Awarded
March 2022
Year Completed
March 2022
Year Registered
June 2011
Abstract
The current dissertation is motivated by the problems persistent in IT multisourcing governance. IT multisourcing (ITM) refers to the provisioning of IT services to a client by multiple IT vendors wherein interdependencies exist among the vendors with respect to their tasks and service delivery. ITM has become a dominant trend in the recent times owing to its several perceived benefits over singlesourcing. The current industry thrust on digital transformation and cloud technologies also appears to be fuelling the ITM trend. However, the complexity of ITM owing to vendor interdependence leads to significant challenges such as difficulty in ensuring collaboration among competing vendors, lack of accountability in overall service delivery, increased moral hazards and difficulty in their detection, and finger-pointing among vendors. Governance is deemed crucial to deal with the challenges of ITM and to ensure smooth delivery of end-to-end services. The practical challenges of IT multisourcing (ITM) have prompted the client organizations to adopt the Guardian model, wherein a vendor (the ‘Guardian’) takes over the responsibility of managing the multiple vendors. Literature broadly refers to the Guardian’s role in ITM governance, yet the Guardian's role is under-theorized. The practical manifestation of the Guardian’s role, the core activities, and the influence of the Guardian is a black box. The debate in the literature on the Guardian’s role as well as on the implications for joint-vendor performance drive the need for an investigation of the core activities of the Guardian vendor. The dissertation addresses the following research question: What is the role(s) of Guardian vendor in ITM governance? Which conditions influence the delegation of this role(s) to the Guardian? The dissertation redefines the ITM governance problem as the problem of decision rights allocation and control. It provides a novel conceptualization of the Guardian’s core activities as the exercise of ‘decision rights’ related to contractual and ex-post governance in ITM. The dissertation follows a two-stage qualitative research design. In stage-1, in-depth exploratory interviews of the key stakeholders of the Guardian model across multiple ITM engagements are carried out to draw from practical knowledge. Findings pertain to the patterns of delegation of decision rights to the Guardian in terms of the decision domains and categories of decision rights, which showed differences in IS development and IS maintenance contexts. The stage-2 research follows a multiple case study design. Overall findings reveal the core activities of the Guardian across multiple decision domains related to strategy, business, contract, process, technology and task. Further, differences have been identified in the patterns of decision rights allocation in terms of the categories of rights (decision control, decision management and decision input rights) with respect to different decision domains and in different hierarchical levels in ITM governance. The study provides explanations for delegation and the different patterns of delegation, and contributes to the decision rights as well as the overall ITM governance literatures. Key implications for practitioners are also identified. The framework of decision rights and decision domains for ITM governance, can be used as a tool to identify areas amenable to the Guardian’s involvement. Practitioners must assess these areas from the viewpoint of knowledge-agency trade-offs, and the coordination and specific knowledge requirements to consider delegation. The study also offers guidelines for monitoring and controlling the Guardian’s activities under non-optimal delegation to the Guardian.
Pagination
200p.
Copyright
Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Document Type
Dissertation
DAC Chairperson
Bandi, Rajendra K
DAC Members
De, Rahul; Ojha, Abhoy K
Type of Degree
Ph.D.
Recommended Citation
Shroff, Bhavya Peapully, "A study of the guardian vendor role in it multisourcing" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 46.
https://research.iimb.ac.in/doc_dissertations/46
Relation
DIS-IIMB-FPM-P22-08
