Two types of information technology (IT) outsourcing governance-contractual and relational-are commonly employed to address different goals in IT service management in outsourcing arrangements. Contractual governance helps improve efficiency in an outsourcing relationship, whereas relational governance facilitates satisfying changing business needs. Past literature argues that both forms of governance are important and that an appropriate balance between them is necessary. This study finds that these two forms of governance often conflict with one another. We contribute to the research on IT outsourcing governance by opening the black box of the evolutionary process of achieving ambidexterity in this context. Organizations shift their focus between contractual and relational forms of governance in an attempt to develop practices that address conflicts between the two forms. We present the findings from a qualitative study of an organization that outsourced its IT services. Our findings reveal how a balance between contractual and relational governance can be achieved through a process we call the ambidexterity pendulum.
Distributed software development has become a common reality with the advent of off-shore development and the need to be close to markets. Also, the dynamic nature of the environment in which businesses operate suggests the use of agile development methods. Whereas distributed software development requires the use of formal processes advocated by plan-driven approaches, rapidly changing environments are appropriate candidates for the use of agile development methods. This tension in agile distributed development poses conflicting demands between alignment and adaptability in the software development process. We conducted a multisite case study of three projects that use agile distributed development to examine how these organizations developed contextual ambidexterity-the ability to pursue conflicting demands simultaneously. Our findings, presented as a conceptual framework, indicate that conflicting demands between alignment and adaptability posed by agile distributed development can be addressed by a set of balanced practices that shape performance management and social context-two important antecedents of contextual ambidexterity.