10th Resilience Engineering Symposium: Resilience at Frontiers, Frontiers of Resilience · Jun 26 2023
Since the Second World War, the concept of “out-sourcing” has increasingly seen organizational boundaries redrawn as both manufacturing and services were carried out by external companies. With the rise of information technologies and the nascent days of the public Internet, IT out-sourcing also emerged as a practice(Lacity et al, 2009). And recently, there has been a marked shift towards outsourcing operational responsibilities of business-critical services to third-party vendors. Examples of this include source code management (e.g., GitHub), cloud computing (e.g., Amazon AWS), and business productivity (e.g., Zoom).
This shift allows companies to focus on core competencies and relies on the expertise of others for non-core areas. As these parties enter into business agreements, the result is new dependencies and ways of working. This “multi-party dilemma” is a dynamic that describes challenges at the boundary between interdependent parties, especially during anomaly response. Characteristics of the multi-party dilemma can include information asymmetry, higher costs of coordination, and goal misalignment. It becomes a new form of brittleness and introduces new forms of failure into a complex adaptive system. This paper describes results from a thematic analysis across a corpus of cases conducted by large-scale technology companies and discusses key findings and challenges of the multi-party dilemma in distributed software systems. Some promising directions for embracing the multi-party dilemma across external boundaries conclude this paper.
ResearchGate