Is Innovation dead with outsourcing?
So what do you think? Do you think that outsourcing your IT service(s) to a service provider will improve your chances in getting a service that evolves over time of the contract and enables you to focus on business needs and adopt the service(s) accordingly along the way?
What was your main driver behind your sourcing strategy?
- Cost savings
- Cost restructuring
- Access to knowledge and operational expertise
- Scalability possibilities
- Quality improvements
Or there may be other reasons…
But all in all I tend to see that whatever reason there is behind an outsourcing deal it has most of the time been good at that time, and notice that I wrote AT THAT POINT IN TIME.
But have you really evaluated and thought about the coming x months that you have to live with your supplier (now partner in the best of worlds) and the service that you’ve contracted to a price of X, with a service description and agreed SAL/SLO’s? How do you ensure that whatever change that occurs in your business requirements over the contract length can be changed or adopted along the way without major issues? And do you think that your service provider will continue to deliver this service with the same quality and customer focus like your previous internal IT organization (I doubt it unless you’re a very good buyer).
One thing that I really suggest is to bear this in mind and know what you’re getting before letting another supplier provide you with the service! And please, ensure that you keep business analysts, solution architects etc within your own organization that can work pro-actively with your business to align your strategy goals and IT service roadmaps accordingly. And ensure that the service provider knows that this is something that you want to do and also state it in the contract, it’s hard and perhaps impossible but outsourcing needs to be a win-win deal, otherwise you’ll suffer hard…
Think about such an easy thing as that you now want to adopt one of the cloud services that today are evolving and getting more and more mature, like Office 365, ShareFile etc. How hard isn’t it to introduce these services in the middle of a contract, is the supplier willing to review the contract, price models etc? I doubt it! Could you change your price model from a named user to a concurrent user model?
This is interesting and new business models will emerge and suppliers have to change their models, larger service providers will be required to bundle these in as options to their own products and in-house services… and this will be an interesting journey that we have in front of us the coming years.
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 