Understanding the Dialectic Relationship between Intra and Inter-Organizational Cooperation

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often seen as a vehicle for organizational reform. However, the established literature on achieving ICT based reform tends to focus upon the private sector and is unsuitable for analysing the public sector. In the public sector ICT reform is usually delivered through complex partnership arrangements with private sector organizations. This seen the emergence of the Strategic Service Partnership (SSP) in which an interorganizational relationship is established between a public sector organization and a private sector organization. This partnership allows for the private sector organization to become the exclusive provider of ICT systems for the public sector organization. These ICT systems allow for intra-organizational communication and coordination to be achieved. As such reform which seeks to enable intra-organizational collaboration is shown to be dependent upon the establishment of inter-organizational collaboration. These two factors are understood in terms of a dialectic relationship.