This thesis considers standardizing service requirement specification for IT sourcing. The potential benefits a standardization of service requirements writing combined with Scania IT:s developing strategy have created a need for an investigation about how requirements standardization for IT sourcing could be done. This thesis is built upon three different approaches, requirements engineering, service oriented requirement engineering and best practices. Combined, these different approaches comprise the theory model RSB that will be used in the requirements standardization work. The strategies for collecting data, the authors choose embedded case study. The main problem at Scania IT regarding requirements specification in sourcing is the absence of a standard. The service requirements specifications varies in quality and execution, which causes communication problems. In order to standardize the requirements specification, the authors of this thesis have developed a standardization model consisting of three phases. A template is developed and presented in this thesis, the template is also included in the standardization phases model. The template created in this thesis, based on the RSB-model combined with the empirics, shows how a standard template can be designed. This study also suggests a three-phase model for working with standardization in the future. The standardization model suggest a requirements management software connected to a database.

Information technology outsourcing (ITO) can be defined as “the commissioning of a third party (or a number of third parties) to manage a client organization’s IT assets, people, and/or activities […] to required results” (Fitzgerald and Willcocks, 1994). It has been a pivotal topic on Chief Information Officers’ (CIO) agendas ever since Eastman Kodak’s decision to hand over their information systems function to IBM, DEC, Anderson Consulting, and Businessland in 1989. Never before had such a wellknown company that considered IT as a strategic asset handed over responsibility for it to an external partner (Applegate, 1992). The deal showed that ITO can constitute an alternative to managing complex Information Technology (IT) systems in-house (Kern and Willcocks, 2000) and subsequently led executives across different industries to follow suit and sign large contracts worth multiple hundred million dollars. The “Kodak effect” served as a starting point to what would become an important strategic matter for IT managers to consider (Caldwell, 1994). 30 years later, ITO has developed into a common practice for organizations of all sizes, industries, and geographies (Qi and Chau, 2013). Over the course of three decades, practitioners have come to appreciate ITO especially for its advantages in terms of cost, flexibility, and the possibility to capitalize on external capabilities (Martins et al., 2015; Schneider and Sunyaev, 2016). Today, virtually every Fortune 500 company2 and many large public institutions outsource a significant portion of their IT services (Patil and Wongsurawat, 2015). As a consequence, an entire global industry has evolved around ITO, with annual growth rates of around 10% and an estimated market size of around 320 billion US dollars in 2015 (Faisal and Raza, 2016). The increasing relevance of ITO in practice has also attracted considerable research that has explored various aspects of outsourcing, including common motivations, outcomes, success factors, benefits, and risks (Dibbern et al., 2004; Gonzalez et al., 2006; Lacity et al., 2009; Lacity et al., 2010; Lacity et al., 2016; Liang et al., 2015). Notwithstanding its three decades of existence, however, ITO remains a dynamic phenomenon that is subject to the ongoing rapid developments in the economic and societal environment in which it is embedded. Major developments in the field of IT, particularly the ever-progressing digitalization and the rise of IT-centered and -enabled business models (Bughin et al., 2019; Harvey Nash/KPMG, 2018; Legner et al., 2017), require adequate consideration in IT sourcing decision-making.