IT organizations are increasingly interested in adopting DevOps models to deliver applications faster, better and cheaper to the business, but they're not inclined to look to their IT service providers for help with these efforts.
As business needs--and the new technologies required to support them--evolve ever more rapidly, outsourcing contracts signed just a year or two ago are already getting stale. That's why Mayer Brown business and sourcing technology partner Dan Masur is advising companies to revamp their outsourcing deals right now to not only access new options, but also to cut significant costs.
A new study from the Everest Group reports that most global in-house offshore centers deliver more savings than offshore outsourcing.
Three days after Nigel Prince joined the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as CIO, his ambitions were reined in.
“The chief financial officer told me about all the money I didn’t have to spend on all the whizzy stuff I thought I could do in the MAF environment,” he told a recent CIO Insights luncheon.
The need to keep information secure is not a recent development. To satisfy this need, most organisations construct a list of security requirements based on common sense. This has proven fairly effective with simple and well understood media such as pen and paper. As information management (and its security) has become more complex in nature, the likelihood of a gap in that common sense list of requirements has increased.
IT services industry watchers say the question is not if, but when the next big merger between outsourcing vendors will happen.
Most information technology leaders enter into outsourcing relationships with a reasonable understanding of where they'd like their IT services provider to take them-some point in the future where the state of IT has been improved by saving money, increasing efficiency, or implementing new enterprise systems.
The ever-increasing economic pressure continues to drive IT professionals to take a closer look at infrastructure outsourcing as an efficient means of filling their resource gap and driving business transformation. As a result there are a number of best practices in IT infrastructure outsourcing engagements that can help the process along.
Outsourcing experts, IT analysts (and optimistic vendors) are predicting an increase in IT services deals during the second half of 2009. They foresee an uptick in outsourcing driven by enterprises looking to increase IT efficiency and cut costs.
Once upon a time, IT service providers demanded exclusivity from customers. As those early outsourcing deals wore on, clients grew weary of being locked in to a "one and only" provider. To keep their customers happy, outsourcing vendors began offering minimum volume and revenue commitment clauses, which gave customers some room to breathe while insuring a certain level of return for IT service suppliers.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Retaining strategically important IT staff in a recession can provide an organisation with competitive advantage. Outsourcing selectively now is a good option, but retaining in house project management skills is the key for IT leaders when the economic climate improves.
If you have an outsourcing contract for work in Bogota, Colombia, Bangkok, Thailand, or Johannesburg, South Africa, you should be aware that they rank as the riskiest offshore outsourcing destinations in the world. Locations in India and Brazil also made this inauspicious list. Where do you outsource?