Modeling the Impact of IT Business Alignment on Business Process Outsourcing Success

This paper introduces the theoretical foundation of an ongoing research project whose goal is to disclose how IT business alignment (ITBA) impacts business process outsourcing (BPO) success. We propose ITBA to be one of the important issues in the BPO context which can be tackled by the IS community. We regard BPO through an “innovation adoption lens” and merge findings from two different literature strands (adoption of innovations and ITBA) in order to analyze how ITBA, as a routine-based process of knowledge sharing and creation, enhances a firm’s ability to successfully adopt BPO. This approach allows us to make a contribution to the adoption of innovations literature by helping to “fill the gap” between individual and organizational levels of analysis.