Personal Network Competencies

Traditionally the competency of an IT worker has been largely measured in technical terms. The ability to understand and deploy complex technology was seen as the critical skill required. However, the environment is changing. The time where applications could simply automate tried and tested manual processes with the confidence that immediate benefits to the business would result, is now past. The industry has matured to the extent that current IT applications need to develop and evolve hand in hand with the business.

Research Methology

This appendix provides a detailed description of the methods, analytical techniques and data sources used to address the two research questions, and provide tests for the five hypotheses reported on in Chapter VIII.

Technology, Web 2.0 and Beyond

In this chapter the impact of the technology trends implied by web 2.0 and beyond, on IT Governance and sourcing will be addressed. The remainder of this chapter will provide a description of the evolution of IT developments through to the introduction of Web 2.0 technology, as it relates to IT Governance and sourcing strategies.

Intra-Organizational Networks

The growing interest in internal networks within organisations has been spawned by the apparent ineffectiveness of the traditional hierarchical organisational structures to deal with the complexity of today’s business environment. Even with matrix structures, which can generate their own operational complexities, there is always an extra dimensional lever that executives would like to have access to. In designing organisational structures executives can choose to design around product or service lines, geographies, business processes, supply chain flows, customers, core competencies and the like. With the desire to facilitate faster decision making, executives are looking to flatten organisational structures, pushing accountability further down the line. The consequences are that hierarchical power and the power of position is now being eroded. The proportion of work activities needing to be achieved through influence and negotiation, rather than direction, is continually growing. As identified in the previous chapter, this is having a major impact on the competency requirements of managers operating in a more networked environment.

The Intelligent Enterprise

J.B. Quinn’s influential book on The Intelligent Enterprise was published in 1992 and joined a small cadre of scholars and practitioners reacting to the growth in the services sector and the decline of traditional manufacturing as the dominant source of employment. In 1992, the Swedish Coalition of Service Industries1 established a project entitled the “Valuation of Service Companies”, in recognition of the need to develop more appropriate valuation and reporting mechanisms for firms whose major assets were intangible. The genesis of this activity can be traced back to the 1980s and the work on the “invisible balance sheet” by the Swedish KONRAD group, several of whose members are credited with pioneering the concepts behind Intellectual capital (IC) reporting and management. The publishing of the “Valuation of Service Companies” report provided the basic framework on which subsequent researchers and business practitioners developed IC reports2. This report describes a “new annual report” with four key indicators: market position; human resources/knowledge; structural value; and financial indicators.

Guidelines for IT Governance and Multisourcing in the Networked Economy

It is argued that the intangible elements are growing in importance as the world’s economies become increasingly interdependent. Therefore the time is right to extend IT Governance practices to incorporate the management of the intangible aspects of your business or organisation.

Corporate Social Capital and the Intelligent Enterprise

This chapter is concerned with building up the concept of Corporate Social Capital (SC) as a critical firm resource in terms the governance of multisourcing relationships. The establishment of Corporate SC as a performance related concept draws from the related concepts of Social Networks (SN), Intellectual capital (IC) and Corporate Reputation (CR). The relevance of the relationship aspects of SN has been established in chapter III (Figure 12). Also addressed in that review was the knowledge based theory of the firm, that will be developed in more detail through an exploration of the IC literature and the CR literature, each seen as contributing to a foundation for Corporate SC and ultimately impacting IT Governance and multisourcing relationships.

Multisourcing Networks

So how did multisourcing networks come about? It is worth taking some time to trace the evolution in business that has brought us to this point of multisourcing networks. In terms of sourcing, one can look through the three eras of pre-industrial, industrial and information/knowledge identified in Figure 8. This helps the reader to gain some insight into the overall trends that are taking place, and therefore hopefully helps to predict what actions one will need to take, to be successful.

IT Governance

In this chapter a selective review of current IT Governance practice is provided. The intent is to provide a context for future chapters rather than to act as a comprehensive review. Hence the review only covers the major developments. It starts by looking at the empirical research on IT Governance with the focus being on Weill and Ross (2004), who in research terms have written “the book” on IT Governance. This is followed be a review of the two most dominant public IT Governance guidelines and frameworks in COBIT and ITIL.

The Global IT Outsourcing Market

This chapter will initially take a closer look at the extent of networking in the global IT markets. Novel market research techniques are used to discover relationship centric intelligence, typically missing from traditional market analyses. This will be followed by a section on networks spanning the client/provider interface, looking at how network structures can enhance the client provider relationship. The client provider interface is often governed through formal structures and roles. This analysis provides some insight into the potential negative impacts of relying solely on this style of governance. Finally, the topic of innovation, and innovation networks, will be addressed. Injecting innovation into the IT sourcing relationship has proven somewhat elusive given the twin objectives of cost reduction through implementing standard IT infrastructures and processes, while at the same time creating new business opportunities through the innovative use of IT. The network perspective provides new insight into this conundrum and some avenues for profitable change.