Evaluating the applicability of socially-oriented perspectives to the IT service level agreement negotiation process: a theory-driven exploratory study

Continuing exponential growth in the Information Technology (IT) outsourcing market implies a need to understand the negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that underlie the majority of those sourcing relationships. Knowledge of the negotiation processes that are associated with the development of IT SLAs is a necessary precondition for designing and developing Negotiation Support Systems (NSSs) intended to support those processes. To gain such knowledge, it is first necessary to identify theoretical perspectives that may be relevant to the IT SLA negotiation process, postulate reasonable propositions therefrom, and then evaluate those propositions in a practical, exploratory fashion. Accordingly, the current paper draws on socially-oriented perspectives to develop theory-driven propositions which are then evaluated in an experimental setting. The results of this study indicate that several socially-oriented theories may be relevant to the IT SLA negotiation process, and represent a starting point for the identification of context-specific IT SLA negotiation support systems.