Abstract

Strategic IT sourcing provides business and IT executives significant opportunities to improve business operations, reduce costs, support existing business and technology strategies, and enable new and transformational strategies. Achieving these benefits of strategic IT sourcing requires understanding the foundational critical success factors in planning and managing of sourcing relationships. Factors include understanding the service management foundation of sourcing agreements, establishing partnerships and achieving trust among the participants, recognizing and providing for the business and technology turbulence in business and technology areas, and establishing the core responsibilities and accountabilities of all parties for the business and technology partners. These factors have evolved over time, from single-party sourcing contracts to complex multi-party operational and strategic agreements among multiple business and IT partners. These factors all apply, but not in the same way in each specific strategic IT sourcing agreement. Chapter 1 introduces these factors and provides critical insights as to how to apply them specifically to a given strategic IT sourcing situation.