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

The strategic staffing program contract. 
By mid-2013, Icarus eventually awarded the 
SSP contract, valued between $20 million and $40 million per year, to ComTech, a global IT 
vendor headquartered in India. Although ComTech had experience with IT outsourcing and 
Supply Chain application development, it had almost no prior experience working with Icarus. 
Richard had expected to complete this phase, begin transitioning work to ComTech, and 
redeploy employees by the end of 2012. In actuality, it would take until the end of 2013 to make 
that progress. 

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Early implementation phase. 
While Solution Development was the longest of the 
phases, Early Implementation proved the most disruptive. This research concluded at the end of 
this phase. Icarus’s sales were considerably lower than forecasted during this time, and the 
expected need for increased staffing levels—therefore the original “capacity problem”—failed to 
materialize. Unsurprisingly, Icarus also placed financial pressure on ComTech, who had agreed 
to underwrite much of the expense needed to transition work from Icarus to their team. 
ComTech had staffed SSP with nearly three hundred contractors, but delays in 
redeploying Icarus IT employees to new roles had significantly slowed SSP’s overall progress. 
Placing impacted employees into new roles during this phase was hampered by the general lack 
of open positions across the entire IT department. This placement process was protracted and 
fraught with anxiety for employees who feared they would lose their jobs. Tensions that began 
during Solution Development peaked during Early Implementation. Internal IT teams were at 
odds over ComTech’s abilities and cultural fit with Icarus. Some executives and employees 
openly questioned the soundness of the SSP strategy itself, given the changes in the macro 
business climate compared to when they began SSP three years earlier. Chapter Eight concludes 
the data analysis of this study and explores the crucial events that led to key personnel changes in 
the face of serious executive loss of confidence in the project. 

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CHAPTER SEVEN 
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVES’ CULTURE AND RITUALS 
Icarus IT executives had a passive, groupthink approach to strategy and planning and 
performed a number of cultural rituals to socialize ideas and make decisions. These rituals 
occurred throughout the study, but were most notable during the Strategic Staffing Program’s 
(SSP’s) Solution Development Phase (see Figure 6.2). As discussed in Chapter Five, the Icarus 
IT habitus was viewed as highly collaborative and consensus driven. A premium was placed on 
socializing information with one’s key partners and receiving their feedback ahead of meetings 
where decisions were expected to be made. This process of incremental improvement and 
perfectionism often prolonged decision making. Once made, decisions were expected to be 
flawlessly executed. However, it was an unspoken but regular practice among executives to 
regularly fake consensus and later withdraw their support for each other’s strategies as a way to 
advance their own careers. It was the “Icarus way” for executives to attempt to mask these 
behaviors (with mixed results) by employing political discourse, symbolic imagery, and 
“performances” to socialize key strategies to employees.
This chapter draws on Harvey’s (1988) Abilene Paradox, Goffman’s (1959) “front region” 
(referred to as “front stage” in this research) and “backstage” performances, and Jackall’s 
“looking up and looking around,” and “dexterity with symbols” (2010) as analytic tools. As in 
previous chapters, the Icarus habitus and capital (Bourdieu, 1972/1977; 1983/1986), Lincoln’s 
taxonomy (1989), and Brown and Duguid’s infocentrism (2000) continue to support the analysis 
in this chapter.