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There are regular debates in the fashion press as to whether black/blue/grey/brown (delete as appropriate) will be the new black! The never ending deliberation as to what is the staple trend of the season results in a short lived outcome that is replaced no sooner than it reaches the high street.

Correspondingly, those of us in the sourcing markets have known for years and with reasonable confidence that “Out is the new Out”. Outsourcing has remained the failsafe pair of jeans of the industry.

Fear

(Noun)

An unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain or harm

Unknown

(Noun)

An unknown person or thing

You can see it now – a voice says “we need to review the IT Risk Register” and everyone suddenly has a more pressing meeting to go to. Perhaps the reason for this reluctance to review the register is born from the fact that it typically contains many items around technology and the need to invest in technology and infrastructure. Whilst it is important to acknowledge the significance of this, equal weight must be given to managing the risks relating to an outsource service.

Are you receiving the full benefit from your outsourcing arrangements?

Did you sufficiently revise your IT's organisational structure when you outsourced some IT services?

Many organisations in both the public and private sectors are not gaining all the benefits that they could from their outsourcing initiatives. This is because they have not sufficiently modified the structure of their in-house (retained) IT organisation to optimise their operations in an outsourced environment.

All too often in our work as sourcing advisors, we come across disappointing sourcing relationships with ‘SLAs at Green’ but ‘Relationship at Red’. We will probably hear comments along the lines of "I guess the service is more or less OK, but where is all that innovation and added value we expected?"

So how can you avoid this depressing situation and end up instead with an exemplary sourcing partnership which is widely recognised internally and externally as delivering significant business benefit?