Rise and Fall of an Information Technology Outsourcing Program: a qualitative Analysis of a Troubled Corporate Initiative

Anomaly #3: the capacity problem fades away. 
The capacity problem was the 
foundational reason for starting SSP. IT executives legitimized the problem given their forecast 
for increased work stemming from business demand and Icarus’s year-over-year sales growth. 
However, Icarus experienced weaker than expected sales as SSP progressed throughout 2013. 
The once anticipated demand for IT work was by then in doubt as Icarus’s poorer financial 
performance drove executives to focus on expense management as a top priority. While there 
were hundreds of unfilled employee roles at SSP’s onset in 2011, only a few dozen remained by 
2013. Executives who had committed to place impacted employees into new positions now 
began to feel concerned about their ability to honor this obligation: 
We just had such changes in our staffing dynamic at Icarus from when we started this. 
We had two hundred fifty open positions. [We] couldn’t keep up when this started which 
made it [SSP] really, really appealing. What’s interesting from an organizational 
perspective is now we don’t have enough open positions to absorb this because people 
aren’t moving, which is really weird. So I’m sure it makes people inside take pause [and 

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ask], “Should we just stop?” ...[the] lack of opens [unfilled employee jobs] right now sort 
of creates a pressure point in the conversation I think. (Executive, personal 
communication, August 1, 2013) 
Executives recognized that the capacity problem had in effect passed, and also began to grapple 
with a shift from a long-held growth paradigm to an expense management paradigm. 
Nevertheless, SSP continued due in part to Richard’s continued ability to maintain Jack’s support 
and vital social capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986). Another factor keeping SSP on life support could 
have been the political necessity for Richard and his supporters to keep the program moving 
forward. There appeared to be no graceful exit or way to stop the project, and to do so would 
have been devastating to Richard’s moral career (Goffman, 1961). 
Executives lacked a shared set of success measures for SSP. Some predicted SSP would 
save money; others claimed it would cost more. However, virtually everyone seemed to agree 
that the capacity problem that drove the creation of SSP no longer existed. In some ways, like a 
computer glitch that seems to no longer exist, the capacity problem “worked itself out.” The 
digital tsunami of expected IT work did not materialize. Furthermore, Icarus had been able to fill 
most of their open IT positions at a rate faster than their attrition. Yet Richard moved SSP 
forward with full speed and Jack’s full support. Executives struggled to keep impacted 
employees engaged while knowing there were more employees waiting for new assignments 
than open positions available: 
We don’t have a place for them [impacted employees], and our message is, “We’re 
working on it. We understand it. We’re working on it,” which does not really resonate 
very well with them. Their confidence in us is pretty low. I cannot argue about [needing 
additional] capacity [via outsourcing]. I can’t make that claim and I won’t make that 

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claim, it’s not true. We could try to pitch the need to bring on the expertise, but that 
doesn’t really warrant this approach. Honestly, it falls really flat when people ask that 
question because there isn’t a strong [answer]...the reasons we did it [SSP] initially made 
sense at the time. Today there’s a lot of things that are very different. (Executive, 
personal communication, August 10, 2013) 
In 2012, executives committed to placing all impacted employees in new positions. By 2013, 
executives found themselves stuck, in a sense, with an obligation made under a different 
paradigm (Kuhn, 2012), and one they were unsure if they could keep. Executives faced the 
competing challenges of maintaining their credibility with employees and the reality that they 
now had more employees than open positions in the midst of an expense crisis. Employees were 
also keenly aware of this dilemma.