How companies use the Internet when buying IT consultancy services

Today, companies focus on their core competencies to a greater extent. Instead of producing services within the companies, more and more services are purchased externally. Parallel to the rapid growth of the service industry, technological development has provided new marketing tools such as the Internet that could be used for different purposes when buying services. One kind of services that companies increasingly buy is IT consultancy services. As the buying of IT consultancy services increases there is also a growing need to understand the industrial buying behavior of these services. It is particularly important for IT consultancy companies to understand the decision making process of organizational buyers in order to develop effective marketing programs. Considering this, the research problem was formulated to describe how companies buy IT consultancy services and how they use Internet when buying these services. To answer the research problem we conducted a qualitative study on two cases. The data was collected by personal interviews at Ferruform AB and Ericsson Erisoft AB. The study is based on established theories, which were tested by conducting two interviews. The study shows that companies use Internet, when buying IT consultancy services, for information search, information gathering, correspondence, and service delivery. However, one finding indicates that there are differences in Internet usage, depending on the buying companies' experience with IT consultancy services and buying these services. Another finding is that the buying process that is described in the theory not is fully applicable on the buying of IT consultancy services, when the buying company has great experience within the area. Therefore, this thesis presents a new model of the buying process when buying IT consultancy services.Validerat; 20101217 (root