A Governance Mechanisms Framework for Multisourcing in Business Groups

Implementing multisourcing in business groups is challenging, and linear-extension of dyadic information technology (IT) outsourcing literature is insufficient to cope with multisourcing specifics. By pursuing design science research (DSR) as the research orientation and utilizing expert interviews, action research and case studies as individual research methods, the authors propose a multisourcing maturity model as an IT governance mechanism. This article contributes in four areas: first, it derives requirements for IT governance mechanisms intended to support the implementation of multisourcing in business groups; second, it identifies the research gap by analyzing current concepts; third, it develops a maturity model; and fourth, it demonstrates the ap­plication of the model with two real-life case examples of leading financial services providers. Moreover, the maturity model provides practical guidance for coping with the challenges of implementing multisourcing by identifying the required capabilities, illustrates a desired evolution path to effectively and efficiently utilize multisourcing, and can be employed for steering multisourcing in business groups.