· Which kind of risk would diminish with multi-sourcing? Which kind of risk are enhance?

CASE STUDY: adidas Group: IT Multi-Sourcing at adidas

Prepare adidas case for class discussion. Prepare a brief write-up (no more than 5 pages) on the case addressing following issues:

·  Which kind of risk would diminish with multi-sourcing? Which kind of risk are enhance?

·  Multisourcing in context of automobile industry, mentioned at a few places in the case, probably means sourcing for parts from different suppliers. Is that a good parallel for IT services consumed by a firm?

·  Is the term multi sourcing applied to service delivery as well as project delivery?

·  What are IT related capabilities need to achieve goals specified on page 4? Do these capabilities were already available to adidas in 2012?

·  Is the IT governance well defined at adidas? Will you describe IT governance as centralized, decentralized, or hybrid? Did it achieve high level of business and IT alignment?

·  Would you be rather among the top ten customers of a service provider than 257 of large service provider? After all the large service provider most got to where it is by excelling in servicing its customers.

·  Why would questions “What functions or tasks should I outsource?” and “What do I want to internally?” lead to different answer? Aren’t these two questions two sides of the same coin?

·  Does adidas really need CMMI level 5 and CMMI level 4 vendors?

·  Who would bear the cost of going through the learning curve to understand clients business?

·  If the overall project is given to a single vendor who then engages other vendors, will we still call it multi sourcing? Wasn’t Adidas creating and artificial layer of bureaucracy?