How can prospective outsourcing clients prepare their internal organizational workflows to meet
the challenges associated with an outsourcing venture with little penalty in time cost and
effort? Along this guiding question the author empirically investigates the ways in which
several factors of the client company's internal organizational context affect the outcomes of
their outsourcing efforts. The investigated factors represent the client's IT capability the
explicit knowledge in form of business process documentation available within the company and
the level of alignment between the client's IT and business domains. Based on qualitative and
quantitative empirical data S. F. Martin demonstrates that each of these client-specific
factors has a significant inter-organizational impact affecting the quality of the
relationship between client and provider the vendor s performance and outsourcing success.
