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

Infocentric Ouija Board Strategies and Anomalies 
Despite executives’ insistence they would not repeat the folly of their competitor’s failed 
outsourcing programs—they did. SSP became another exemplar of a big company making a bad 
decision about what to do next. Reacting to the digital disruptions of twenty-first century 
retailing, executives were convinced they faced a capacity problem, yet were unsure of what to 
do next to address it. As they felt their way forward, they came up with an infocentric ouija 
board strategy (the Global Staffing Model) that, when coupled with the Icarus habitus, allowed 
the creation of a mega-project that was more about executive ambition than actually solving the 
problem. Not surprisingly, anomalies and externalities to the capacity problem and the reliability 
of the GSM emerged. As SSP stumbled forward, it became increasingly clear that from its very 
beginning the program was an infocentric strategy. As Brown and Duguid (2000) cautioned is 
the case with infocentric endeavors, SSP’s supporters operated with a tunnel vision fixated upon 
the data they found to be most obvious or interesting. Their overreliance on information at the 
expense of the “fuzzy stuff” of social context led Richard and others to misjudge and mishandle 
the ensuing anomalies that occurred. 

---

215 
Following Kuhn’s ideas on the structure of scientific paradigms (2012), this study 
examined three distinct anomalies that executives did not fully acknowledge or effectively 
address. First, Icarus’s Supply Chain software development work proved (to have always been) 
critical to its future strategies—certainly not a “non-differentiated” capability in the brave new 
world of digital retailing. The “non-differentiation” anomaly also drew attention to the impacts 
of the Global Staffing Model as an infocentric ouija board strategy that created little critical 
thinking beyond political debate over inkblot test result interpretations. Next, Richard’s retained 
ownership of SSP after moving down into the Project Delivery Team was an anomaly to the IT 
taxonomy (Lincoln, 1989) that challenged the legitimacy of the power structure between 
Richard’s and Brenda’s teams. Finally, as Icarus presumably fell behind its competitors in the 
twenty-first century retail field, the actual capacity problem SSP was intended to help solve 
never manifested. Executives’ presumed growth paradigm (Kuhn, 2012) gave way to an expense 
management one. The ground had shifted underneath Richard and all of us; we were attempting 
with SSP to solve a three-year-old capacity problem that no longer existed. 
In spite of these anomalies, Richard and his supporters accumulated and used enough 
economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1983/1986) to legitimize and advocate for SSP 
for over three years while attempting to advance their moral careers (Goffman, 1961). With the 
benefit of hindsight, time, and the analytic lenses employed in this work, executives’ actions 
supporting SSP appeared to range from being shortsighted, strategically poor, decisions to 
colossal mistakes. SSP cost significant amounts of time, effort, and capital from both ComTech 
and Icarus; yet the return on these investments appeared marginal at best after more than three 
years. It is important to be very clear that throughout my observations and interviews, no one 
suggested any executive or employee involved deliberately and knowingly sought to sabotage 

---

216 
SSP outright. However, individuals did operate with their own self-interest in mind, which was