Senior Consultant's blog

With the constantly accelerating pace of change, IT organisations are having to stay abreast of innovation in order to support and enable increasingly agile business operations. However, delivering core services and supporting the needs of the shared service functions is more focused on reliability and optimisation. This has created a Bi-modal approach to providing IT services which is being increasingly adopted across market sectors.

But does this change in the delivery of IT services mean that a corresponding change in sourcing for these services is also required?

As the sourcing market matures, clients legitimately gain confidence in what they can do for themselves and yet, as sourcing advisors, we continue to encounter established contracts that are failing to deliver their full potential.

We can attribute this phenomenon to a number of factors, including:

‘Measure, measure, measure….’

Metrics are the foundation of good governance for outsourced services. Much as the mantra ‘Location, location, location’ applies when looking for property, ‘Measure, measure, measure’ can be just as useful a phrase in helping to ensure a new outsourced service is implemented successfully.

Sometimes though, it can be hard to quantify the success of a particular part of a service, especially if it is a softer part of the service. However, the harder it is to find an objective measurement, the more important it often is to the success of the service.

The ‘softer’ parts of a service need objective data the most

Is the IT department becoming surplus to requirements?

With the recent proliferation of cloud services and many technology services now being contracted directly by the business, IT functions are having to justify their existence. Business users are often well informed about the functionality they need and where they can procure it directly. Combine this with IT departments which are often seen as “utilities” and it is a signal that IT needs to consider the value it delivers to business partners. Which services should IT be delivering internally and which services are better delivered by someone else?

As Darwin once said, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. Little did he realise the importance of this statement and the appropriateness of his words to business methodology almost 150 years later.