Investigating the Impact of Outsourcing on IT Flexibility: The Conceptual Independence Perspective

Introduction

Adapting to changing conditions and to a changing context is crucial for the survival of enterprises. In research on IT flexibility the importance of adapting IT to support new business requirements has been confirmed many times. Researchers investigating IT flexibility distinguish dynamic capabilities in firms that enable organizations to adapt to new circumstances (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000; Teece et al., 1997). These capabilities involve sensing and seizing opportunities in the environment and responding to changes with reconfiguring of business processes. This study focuses on the changes necessary in IT for supporting business process change. The authors view business functionality in information systems (IS) as the functionality to support the organization with information retrieval and information processing necessary for business processes.

The adaptability of IS differs across organizations. The authors have researched openEHR and found that new software based on the openEHR standard shows promise in opening rigid structures in software. The number of countries applying the standard increased, including Norway, Sweden, UK, China, Germany, USA, Australia, Slovenia, and the Netherlands (openEHR Foundation, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). In Norway, a pilot application initiated for registration and monitoring of COVID-19 patients in hospitals has recently been deployed and is in use. In a mini-symposium of Stichting openEHR Nederland (openEHR Foundation in the Netherlands) Naess reports (2020) on a diagnosis and treatment decision support system based on openEHR models that were reviewed internationally. The software could be implemented within 11 days because the models have been added to existing openEHR implementations in hospitals. He noted that six hospitals had ordered the openEHR Covid-19 software. Since IS are a major part of the IT infrastructure, the authors presume that the flexibility of IS affects the flexibility of the whole IT infrastructure.

In practice, they have observed that the complexity of current distributed information systems makes adaptation of business functionality difficult (Tarenskeen et al., 2018). The need for flexibility of business information in the conceptual models in IS has not been named explicitly except in descriptions of conceptual independence (McGinnes & Kapros, 2015). No systematic studies are investigating the effects of IS characteristics on the flexibility of the IT infrastructure as a whole. The authors intend to fill in this gap, and therefore, they study a fast-changing sector, the healthcare sector in the Netherlands where a transition is taking place. The authors address the research gap by focusing on an alternative way of organizing software. McGinnes and Kapros (2015) launched the term conceptual independence (CI). In CI, conceptual models in software have been separated from the application logic thereby creating loosely coupled components in software. McGinnes and Kapros make the claim that implementing CI leads to better adaptable IS (McGinnes & Kapros, 2015). Here, the authors claim that CI can be detected as an underlying design principle in openEHR software, and they study the flexibility of IS in openEHR systems. The openEHR standard provides a meta-standard for conceptual models in the medical domain. It is argued here that openEHR is exemplary for CI.

The supplier as the owner and developer of software applications is a determining factor for how conceptual models have been implemented in software. For example, in the healthcare sector in the Netherlands, the determining factor can be found in the supplier of the commercial-off-the-shelf software (COTS).

Hence the authors formulate the research question as: