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

Additional Icarus IT executives. 
Figure 8.1 represents the Icarus IT organization chart
Figure 8.1.
Focused Icarus IT Organizational Chart with Principal Vice Presidents and Directors 

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so as to highlight the specific actors who played key roles during the final phase of SSP covered 
in this chapter. As previously discussed, Donald reported to Richard and led the SSP program for 
over two and a half years before resigning from Icarus. Just before signing the SSP contract with 
ComTech in mid-2013, Richard replaced Donald with William, who was new to IT and had been 
promoted to a director role from within Icarus’s Supply Chain business function. William was 
hired to lead SSP’s implementation, however his tenure in the IT department was brief and he 
resigned after only eight months in his new assignment. Early in SSP’s fourth year (2014), 
Nancy became the third director to lead the initiative. Nancy had no involvement in SSP until 
she was transferred to Richard’s team to replace William. Cynthia was a director who reported to 
Richard at the beginning of SSP. However, she shared Brenda’s opposition to SSP from its 
inception and would later report to Brenda following another revision to the IT organization 
discussed in the upcoming section. 
Anomalies Arise 
Richard initially hoped to transition work to ComTech by the end of 2012, but the Icarus 
decision-making culture prolonged the process. Icarus did not award the contract to ComTech 
until the middle of 2013, and work was not fully transitioned to ComTech until the beginning of 
2014. The one-year time lag between deciding (in 2012) to outsource Supply Chain software 
development and awarding the SSP contract to ComTech (in 2013) was an eternity with respect 
to the pace of businesses in the contemporary digital retail field. This section addresses the 
emergence of three anomalies that threatened SSP’s success from 2013 and into 2014. 
The first anomaly (at least to Richard and other SSP supporters) was that Supply Chain 
development was in fact a “differentiating” capability for digital retailers in the twenty-first 
century. The second anomaly involved a demotion of sorts for SSP within the IT taxonomy. Jack 

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consolidated all of the Business Strategy functions under Brenda, while Richard and Donald 
moved to the Project Delivery Team. This effectively moved Richard from the “top row” to a 
“bottom row” position in the IT organizational chart at the time (see Figure 5.4), which 
exacerbated the tensions between Richard’s and Brenda’s teams. Finally, executives eventually 
came to the realization that Icarus was no longer doing business in a growth paradigm—
following Kuhn’s (2012) description of the concept. Icarus experienced a period of lower sales 
and reduced profits as it presumably began falling behind other competitors in the retail field. As 
a result, the third anomaly occurred—the expected digital tsunami of IT demand, and therefore 
the need for SSP, never materialized. The ground had shifted underneath Richard and his team; 
they were attempting with SSP to solve a two-year-old capacity problem that no longer existed.