Organization Culture: A Barrier to IT Outsourcing

Abstract

Globalization has impacted the business in many aspects such as structure, architecture,
internal/external strategies and sourcing management. Outsourcing is one of the recent business
strategies used to provide IT needs via external agent. IT outsourcing is the use of external
service providers to effectively deliver IT-enabled business process, application service, and
infrastructure solutions for business outcomes. Outsourcing enables businesses enterprises to
reduce costs, accelerate time to market, and take advantage of external expertise, assets and
intellectual property. Organization culture is a pattern of shared assumption that the group learn
as it solves its problem of external adaptation and internal integration. Due to benefits
associated with outsourcing most organization are adopting and implementing IT outsourcing.
This paper seeks to explore the influence of organization culture on IT outsourcing and provide
insight on key elements of organization culture impacting IT outsourcing. The study finding show
that organization culture key element such astrust, communication, culture compatibility,
organization openness, commitment, and collaborationif not properly managed can be a great
barrier to IT outsourcing.
Keywords: Organization culture, IT, outsourcing