Outsourcing for Radical Change: A Bold Approach to Enterprise Transformation

See Marcy Tyre and Wanda Orlikowski, ‘‘Windows of Opportunity: Temporal Patterns of Technological Adaptation in Organizations,’’ Organizational Science 5, No. 1 (February 1994), pp. 98–118. Dorothy Leonard also talks extensively about the mutual adjustment between an organization and its new technologies in Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, May 1998).

Personal interview with Michel-Marc Delcommune, February 2003, and public presentation by Antoine Parmentier, MOL Accounting and Tax Director, September 6, 2002, at the European Outsourcing Summit. See www.malekigroup.com.

CFO Europe, ‘‘Finance’s Finest,’’ April 2002, www.cfoeurope.com.

Unpublished Accenture survey, January 2003.

Jane Linder and Thomas Healy, ‘‘Outsourcing in Government: Pathways to Value,’’ Accenture Government Executive Series research report, May 2003.

Jane Linder, Susan Cantrell, and Scott Crist, ‘‘Business Process Outsourcing Big Bang: Creating Value in an Expanding Universe,’’ Accenture Institute for Strategic Change research report, July 2002.

One study, for example, found that three-quarters of managers in firms surveyed believe that outsourcing outcomes have fallen short of expectations (E. R. Greenberg and C. Canzoneri, Outsourcing: the AMA Survey [New York: American Management Association, 1997]). Another study found that 20 to 25 percent of all outsourcing relationships fail within two years and that 50 percent fail within five (Marq R.Ozanne, D&B Barometer of Global Outsourcing, 2000). M. Clemente and D. Greenspan find that merger and acquisition transactions fail more than half the time (Winning at M&A [New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998]). According to the Gartner Group, half of all strategic alliances fail to deliver the desired results.