IT Outsourcing in Interagency Collaborations: Lessons from Public Safety Networks

In this paper, we report on research in progress on how IT outsourcing fares in digital government settings. Our research is motivated by the twin goals of (1) analyzing the antecedents for successful IT outsourcing in the public sector and (2) understanding the role of collaboration between public agencies in their ability to achieve its outsourcing goals with a privately owned outsourcing vendor. Public Safety networks (PSNs) are collaborative initiatives created for facilitating communication and sharing information among various first responder agencies at different governmental levels and geographies. The interorganizational nature of PSNs makes their IT infrastructure extremely complex. Outsourced complex projects are especially dependent on the quality of outsourcing relationships. In the case of PSNs, this relationship is cross-sectoral, which, according to the literature, poses additional challenges. Our extensive data set includes more than seventy PSNs. Forty PSNs in the sample outsource; almost all report achieving their outsourcing goals. This satisfaction level is unusually high. We propose that the collaborative nature of the PSNs explains their ability to build successful relationships with a private IT outsourcing vendor. We review the IT outsourcing literature, present a preliminary analysis of our data set, and discuss the implications of our findings for the academic and practitioner communities in this poster session.