Information Technology Purchasing Organizing

In a supply chain perspective, a critical role is played by the interfaces of a company with the other ones, and, in this paper, we focused on the purchasing department as the entity managing the relationships with suppliers. Much literature has debated about purchasing strategy at a very high and strategic level, but further research is probably needed to clarify which are the relationships among company characteristics, strategy and organization inside the purchasing department. Moreover, in seeking for efficiency, companies are starting also to analyze indirect goods purchases: a field in which literature seems to be particularly weak. The scope of the paper is to investigate how companies structure their purchasing processes in order to buy Information Technology (IT). This is indeed an interesting category as it can represent indirect purchases as a whole but can be still split into sub-categories treated differently, such as high-value hardware (i.e. servers, storage, etc.), consumables (i.e. PC, printers, etc.), standard and non-standard software and services. Moreover, IT has different technical issues, so that the process of buying IT often involves the IT department with different roles and responsibilities. Evidences from multiple case studies led to describe in detail different phases of IT buying, isolating three different approaches: Traditional, Purchasing Oriented and IT Strategic. Such approaches differ in terms of roles assumed by IT and Purchasing departments, distribution of decisional power, type of company internal skills and capabilities, parameters for supplier selection and so on. Generally speaking, they emphasize the overall scope of purchasing activities and reflect possible contingencies able to explain different IT purchasing configurations.