Decoding digital transformational outsourcing: The role of service providers' capabilities

The business process outsourcing industry has got disrupted, first by the significant shift in value creation activities from the clients to the service providers, and second by pervasive digital penetration, resulting in the emergence of Digital Transformational Outsourcing (DTO). Service providers now play a more significant role, making their capabilities important. In the new context, service providers require a uniquely different set of dynamic capabilities to handle end-to-end business functions on behalf of their clients while delivering digital value propositions. We study 26 of the largest global business process outsourcing providers to conceptualise and identify six dynamic capabilities of service providers salient in the new context, i.e., consultative, orchestration, insights, network management, knowledge access, and standardisation. Interviews conducted with industry experts provided evidence in support of the identified dynamic capabilities. A novel firm capability dataset was created using secondary data, and using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we identify configurations for high and low performance and find them to vary by the firm's broad/narrow scope.