Developing IS Enabled Capabilities for a BPO Vendor: A Case Study

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that explore how information systems can be used to facilitate service provisioning. Consequently, there is a need to understand how vendors develop IS enabled capabilities that allow them to address a core challenge: to achieve scalable growth by developing standardized offerings that can be sufficiently customized to meet the unique demands of individual customers. This in-depth case study leverages an organizational sensemaking framework to explore IS enabled capability development in one of the largest business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors in the world.