"KT" CarePacks - Collaboration Patterns for Knowledge Transfer: Learning from IS/IT-Outsourcing Case at a Swiss Financial Institution

Organizations now more than ever focus on fostering team work in their daily activities to secure better results for their stakeholders. Team work and collaboration are especially important for inter-organizational outsourcing relationships where these qualities are crucial for the successful knowledge transfer conducted throughout all phases of outsourcing relationship. Knowledge workers involved in such complex, inter-organizational collaboration processes require support to secure structured and well managed collaboration. Consequently, there is a strong need of service receiver organizations to use sustainable approaches for the knowledge transfer to satisfy recurring transfer processes in forthcoming sourcing activities. Idea of “pattern” offers encapsulated approach for describing solutions for recurring problems and is already successfully used within the IT domain. In this paper we present the concept of patterns for the sustainable knowledge transfer for outsourcing relationships. We introduce CarePacks – reusable patterns for supporting act of the collaborative knowledge transfer and present lessons learned from introducing them at a Swiss financial institution while conducting six knowledge transfer pilots in three consecutive trials.