Introducing Service-oriented Organizational Structure for Capability Sourcing

Abstract

At the strategic management level in an organization, participants in the decision making process need to share a common language to facilitate discussions and enhance related decision making. The context of this position paper is about strategic sourcing decision making and the goal is to facilitate it through a well-defined language. Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. In this position paper, capability sourcing is introduced as an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a company’s value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Furthermore, capability sourcing takes place in the service-oriented organizational structure that is introduced as a flexible structure to allocate the resources that shape the firm’s competitive advantages. Therefore, the conceptualization of service system is proposed as a well-defined language for modeling, formalizing, representing and visualizing the concepts, constructs, and models in the capability sourcing process to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making.