The impact of strategic alignment on IT outsourcing success in a complex service setting

The goal of this research is to understand the decisions that lead to better IT outsourcing. The strategic alignment literature is dominated by a focus on strategy formulation at a single point in time. In contrast, little is known about how strategic alignment is enacted in the choices managers make over time, and in particular, as it applies to IT outsourcing decisions in complex service settings. To address this situation we: (1) develop a novel dynamic alignment model that links espoused and enacted strategies, (2) operationalise strategy as a set of strategic decisions around capabilities, and (3) apply a range of novel methods to measure the decisions managers make.