Delivering Knowledge Across Boundaries: A Case Study of Bankco's Offshoring Projects

Although prior empirical studies have repeatedly suggested that knowledge sharing between offshore clients and vendors is critical for the success of offshoring relationships, much less is known about the actual processes of knowledge delivery across organizational knowledge boundaries in these offshoring projects. To fill the research gap and enrich the academic literature, we propose a process framework to demonstrate the actual processes in which knowledge is delivered across boundaries between vendors and clients in the offshoring arrangements. By combining the framework of knowledge boundary and theory of absorptive capacity to analyse the case of BankCo's offshoring project, the stages are identified, through which various types of knowledge are sequentially delivered from clients to vendors by several processes in each stage. In particular, our study reveals that a strategic shift from total global offshoring project to global distributed teamwork renders BankCo an opportunity to overcome the hindrance of pragmatic boundary and insufficient absorptive capacity of the offshoring vendors.