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

Employees’ view of the information technology department.
IT engineers, especially 
those who had been with Icarus for a number of years, were proud of the legacy systems they 
had built. They also wrestled with the changing nature of their jobs—becoming engineers in title 
only. Instead of spending their days coding, testing, and building new applications, they 

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coordinated project activities between contractors and business teams. One engineer noted, “I do 
more technical leadership versus ‘doing IT.’ I mean, here, if you’re a college grad, you’re not 
going to be hands-on. At Icarus, you’re not going to be hands-on for sure” (Employee, personal 
communication, October 19, 2012). Employees also recognized Icarus executives’ focus on the 
core business of the company versus having a technology company focus: 
[IT executives] keep focusing on Icarus being a [retail] company, not an IT 
company...we’re going to be even more focused on business processes. We’re not 
developers any more, especially not here at headquarters in [the U.S.]. Hopefully, a new 
hire coming out of college is not looking to do actual coding work because they’re not 
going to get that. (Employee, personal communication, October 17, 2012) 
The self-identification of “we’re not developers any more” indicated that seasoned IT 
professionals experienced a diminished sense of craftsmanship by being less hands-on when 
compared to their earlier technical and engineering jobs. Nevertheless, experienced engineers 
resigned themselves to, if not accepted, the shift toward a culture of IT buyers and managers 
given Icarus’s locus outside of the technology field. 
Conversely, new IT employees were more malleable to the changing nature of corporate 
IT work. In the emerging pattern, domestic employees managed (predominately Indian) staff 
augmentation contractors rather than performing the direct, hands-on technical tasks 
themselves—a process that had transformed their predecessors from interns into craftsmen over 
their careers: 
With the evolvement of IT over the last thirty years, there’s [sic] so many more solutions 
on the market so why should Icarus be a developer, or think that [it is] an excellent 
developer of solutions when there are solutions on the market? ...That has affected me as 

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an engineer because I’m kind of retooling, so to speak. I’m almost more of a [Project 
Manager]...leading development efforts or...just leading the technical aspects of 
deliverables for a project. It’s been a little bit different for me, at least having been a 
developer really, more often than not most of my life. (Employee, personal 
communication, October 17, 2012) 
The significance of this engineer’s perspective is that it reflects Icarus IT workers’ growing sense 
of key IT professionals’ generational loss of collective memory. As Braverman suggested would 
happen over time skilled labor becomes commoditized (1998), new IT engineers were being 
brought into the system and taking the new organizational direction as a given. As this veteran 
engineer noted, one’s technical skills were basically degraded over time as one advanced into 
planning roles that merely consolidated labor previously done by other workers. Meanwhile, 
from the perspective of hardened Icarus engineers, IT contractors’ development as budding IT 
engineers was technically irrelevant. Put differently, the old-timers considered contractors more 
as mercenaries than as apprentices. 
Like IT workers at other large firms outside the technical field of information processing 
per se, this trend stemmed from the fact that a number of these employees had built many of the 
legacy applications that were still used for functions now considered non-core, given the 
commercial availability of other enterprise software packages. One employee recalled this trend 
and the differences of IT work compared with a decade earlier: 
I haven’t actually been able to write any code at Icarus probably now for twelve to 
thirteen years. (Laughs) Something like that. Writing code is instant gratification, “What 
compiled? That’s good!” (Laughing) Or I ran a task that worked, or I figured out how to 
solve the sticky little problem and that worked. Now the gratification, or the things that 

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are done, [are] a little more diffused. (Employee, personal communication, December 26, 
2012) 
Some employees found they needed to adjust to jobs they realized were increasingly unattractive. 
The Icarus habitus considered IT outsourcing contracts as an objectified form of cultural capital 
to control the IT labor process. Knowledge was becoming concentrated within specialized roles 
(i.e. coordination and contract management versus engineering) that required a different type of 
embodied capital to accomplish work at Icarus. IT workers must accumulate knowledge to use 
contracts as a governance tool over vendor workers as opposed to building their own engineer 
skills. Should this trend continue, Icarus may be left with the task of incenting employees to 
transition to contact management roles that the veteran engineers view as less attractive than 
their previous engineering (or business analysis) roles.