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

Infocentrism and information technology outsourcing.
As implied by its very name, 
information technology outsourcing (ITO) is a naturally infocentric business practice. Said 
differently, ITO contracts represent firms’ attempts to systemize the transfer of knowledge from 
its employees to the employees of a third party. However, what is less likely to be codified in a 
contract (and easily overlooked when developing a business case for IT outsourcing) are what 
Brown and Duguid (2000) described as, “all the fuzzy stuff that lies around the edges—context, 
background, history, common knowledge, social resources” (p. I). As this study will show, an 
overreliance on information (content) over “fuzzy stuff” (context) left Icarus executives’ 
operating with a tunnel vision that would prove to be damaging to their ITO program. 
In addition to learning technical knowledge, ITO service providers need to learn the 
“processes” and standards for working in the buyers’ environment, and the how to put those 
“processes” into “practice” to perform their job duties. Brown and Duguid (2000) make a clear 
distinction between “process” and “practice” (i.e. content versus context) and their impact on 
how individuals learn in a social environment: 
While process is clearly important to the overall coherence of an organization, in the end 
it is the practice of the people who work in the organization that brings process to life, 
and, indeed, life to process. Organizations, then, should not attend to the process and 
process-related explanations only. They must also attend to practice. (pp. 96-97) 
There is a difference in “learning to be” versus “learning about,” or developing “know how” 
versus “know of.” Just because an ITO contract has been established, for example, engineers 

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from the third party are unlikely to be immediately as effective as the hiring firm’s incumbent 
employees. Even if the third party engineers are presented with all of the needed content and 
“processes,” they are likely to need considerable time and interactions with existing engineers 
“around the edges” of this information to develop the “know how” of the systems they are now 
managing. The accumulation of “know of” does not guarantee “know how.” It is “practice” that 
allows people to make sense of and use that information. Thus, learning, in an organizational 
sense, is not a response to a steady supply of facts. Rather, it involves collaborative problem 
solving, storytelling to contextualize information, and improvisation to close the gap between the 
routines of “process” and the reality of “practice” (Brown & Duguid, 2000). 
Infocentric approaches to strategy and change focus on surface issues and can lead to 
oversimplification. When something works well, we may be ignorant of the support we are 
getting from the social periphery of our environment. We ignore the intermediaries that turn 
“process” into “practice” and “know of” into “know how” over time. It is only when something 
goes wrong that the “fuzzy stuff” becomes illuminated, and we are quick to blame these forces in 
the horizons and margins of our environment for our every misfortune (Brown & Duguid, 2000). 
Ultimately, Brown and Duguid (2000) argue that infocentric predictions of future events 
and strategies suffer from a modernistic and reductive focus where we, “tend to take the most 
rapid point of change and to extrapolate from there into the future, without noticing other forces 
that may be regrouping” (p. 31). Left unchecked, our infocentric approaches are directed at data 
most interesting or obvious to us. From there, we are quick to develop ill-informed 
prognostications ignoring things that lie beyond information. Hence, overemphasizing 
information at the expense of context leads to a form of social and moral blindness surmountable 
only by embracing the “fuzzy stuff that lies around the edges.” 

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