Together We Stand, Divided We Fall – Analyzing Information Systems Acquisition as Service

Information systems (IS) acquisition is not a widely studied topic in the literature. In particular, although the role and participation of different stakeholders such as business people, IT people, and external vendors and consultants is acknowledged, little is known about how they cooperate in an IS acquisition project. In this paper, we will apply a value co-creation framework taken from service research as a lens to study an IS acquisition project in an organization. The case organization intends to acquire their new IS as a cloud service. This approach is novel to all stakeholders, so they have to intensively cooperate for example under tight time constraints. The analysis reveals that appropriate cooperative work adds value to all participants, creates a win-win situation, and that the original value co-creation framework needs to be tailored according to the context.