The Role of Organizational Standards in IT Outsourcing Relations

In the last two decades the IT Outsourcing (ITO) academic literature has examined multiple aspects of the outsourcing phenomenon. In this paper we focus on the role and the impact of organizational standards on IT outsourcing relations. We look at organizations regulated by explicit standard models, characterized by system-supported supervision, programmed routines, and hyper-automation. We did so by analyzing the impact of a consolidated standard, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), on the governance of IT service management. This quantitative study is based on the analysis of 200 questionnaire answered by Italian CIOs in 2011, aimed at understanding the role of ITIL and its effects on the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Our findings show a positive relation between the adoption of ITIL and the presence of outsourcing arrangements, and give some hints about the impact of the adoption of standards on governance mechanisms, which open the field to future research.