Impediments to Inter-Firm Transfer of Best Practice in an Enterprise Systems Context

Timbrell, Gregory T.; Andrews, Natalie M.; Gable, Guy G.

doi:10.3127/ajis.v9i1.219

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Xu and Ma (2008, p. 529) defined causal ambiguity as -the lack of understanding of the logical linkage between action and outcomes, inputs and outputs, and causes and effects‖. Timbrell et al (2001) examined the characteristics of knowledge in IS outsourcing projects in Australia and found that knowledge with high causal ambiguity is more challenging and much harder to transfer than less ambiguous knowledge. It can be concluded, therefore, that the greater the ambiguity of the causes and effects of the knowledge, the more difficult is to identify the related knowledge elements and subsequently the chances of transferring the knowledge are limited.…”

Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Joshi et al (2007, p. 326) defined source credibility as -the extent to which a recipient perceive a source to be trustworthy and reputable‖. Trust is the believe that the source' word is reliable and that it will fulfil its obligation as stipulated in the agreement (Timbrell et al, 2001). Lee et al (2008) investigated the impact of trust on IS outsourcing success and found that mutual trust facilitate knowledge sharing between vendors and clients.…”

Section: Source-relatedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Factors impacting knowledge transfer success in information systems outsourcing

Al‐Salti

Hackney

2011

Journal of Ent Info Management

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Despite increased research interest on knowledge transfer in information systems (IS) outsourcing, the field still lacks sound and holistic understanding of the key factors influencing knowledge transfer success. The present paper attempts to provide a synthesis of existing theoretical perspectives and empirical findings related to the factors that facilitate or hamper knowledge transfer success in IS outsourcing. The data collection method is discussed and the key findings are presented. Conclusion is drawn and further research is suggested. Keywords: knowledge transfer, Information systems (IS) outsourcing BACKGROUNDIn today's knowledge-based economy, one of the major sources of competitive advantage has been the ability of the firm to transfer external knowledge efficiently and effectively (Argote and Ingram, 2000;Pawlowski and Robey, 2004;Sambamurthy and Subramani, 2005;Pérez-Nordtvedt et al., 2008). Knowledge transfer is defined by Kumar and Ganesh (2009) as activities of exchanging explicit or tacit knowledge between two agents, during which one agent receive and apply the knowledge provided by the other agent. The agents could be an individual, team/department or an organization (Joshi et al., 2007). In the literature, knowledge transfer has been given various but related labels such as ‗knowledge sharing, ‗knowledge flows', ‗knowledge acquisition' and ‗knowledge mobilization ' (Carmel and Nicholson, 2005;Gosain, 2007;Renzl, 2008;van Wijk et al, 2008).Information systems (IS) outsourcing, where a client organization contract out some or all of its IS functions to one or more external vendors (Lee, 2001), has been regards as an important business strategy for client organizations to transfer new technical and business knowledge from the vendors (e.g. Ko et al., 2005;Tafti, 2007, Blumenberg et al., 2009). Wang et al. (2008 argued that outsourcing IS to high quality vendors has the potential to transfer knowledge that are costly or hard to develop in-house. Furthermore, IS outsourcing allows the client organizations to renew its technical and business knowledge base in order to achieve congruence with changing business environment (Bandyopadhyay and Pathak, 2007). In their (2005) reported that client organizations acquire new implementation, operational and maintenance knowledge from their consultants, so they can learn and later maintain the system independent of the consultant's team. Edguer and Pervan (2004) found that many firms are increasingly looking at IS outsourcing as a means of transferring and leveraging the vendors' superior technical and business knowledge and benefiting complementary skills and specialist expertise that are not available within the organization's boundaries. Knowledge transfer from vendors to clients in IS outsourcing projects occur through a variety of mechanisms. These mechanisms include manuals, personal movement, training, observation, presentations and close interaction with vendors' IS staff (Nicholson and Sahay, 2004;Xu et al., 2006;Chua and Pan, 2008) Knowle...

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Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Source-relatedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Factors impacting knowledge transfer success in information systems outsourcing

Al‐Salti

Hackney

2011

Journal of Ent Info Management

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“…For example, in their study of enterprise system use by the State Government of Queensland, Australia, Timbrell et al (2001) find empirical evidences to support the significant effect of the characteristics of knowledge, the source and the recipient, arduous relationship between the source and the recipient, and barren organizational context on the transfer of best practices. Similarly, Ko et al (2005) examine the knowledge transfer from consultants to client organizations in enterprise system implementations, and conclude the significant performance impact of the set of factors, including motivation of source and recipient, their encoding and decoding competence, shared understanding, and the arduous relationship.…”

Section: Knowledge Transfer In Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Examining the factors influencing cross-project knowledge transfer: An empirical study of IT services firms in China

Zhao

Zuo

Deng

2015

International Journal of Project Management

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“…Consulting companies were one of three groups, depending on performance. [11,27] The characteristics of recipient Communication decoding competence [11] Acquisition willingness [14,30,34] Absorptive capacity [14,18,30,32,35] 4.2. Data collection procedure 4.2.1.…”

Section: Measurement Of Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…impediments to knowledge transfer); it had a negative effect on knowledge transfer. Timbrell et al [32] explored the stickiness origins of ES best practice transfer. In their study, causal ambiguity did not rank within the top 4 factors in any transfer phase.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%