What happens if the country you outsource to suddenly goes dark? Early adopters of Egyptian IT and business process services are finding out today. Egypt's government reportedly blocked all Internet and cell phone service overnight Thursday as anti-government protests continued in the North African nation.
As the latest technologies are incorporated into the business process, organisations will naturally become more comfortable when working with third-party technology vendors. This means the ability to identify, select, and manage the right technology vendor can make the difference between the success and failure of a new business initiative. But, while many sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals are starting to play an increasingly important role in this emerging technology evaluation process, many of Forrester's sourcing clients explain that their involvement is not always clearly defined, resulting in a more reactive and makeshift role than they would like.
Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) has selected Datacom to deliver its outsourced IT services from April 2011.
The news comes as LINZ announces its appointment of Russell Turner of MetService, as its chief information officer starting in the New Year.
Competitive costs, robust government support, the largest labor market in the world. It's no wonder that for the past decade China has been deemed the biggest--and only--threat to India's dominance in the IT offshore outsourcing industry. In recent years, all the big names in IT outsourcing--from IBM, HP and Accenture to Wipro, TCS, and Infosys--have set up shop there.
Gartner research vice president Frances Karamouzis calls China "one of the most analyzed alternatives to India." Ovum principal analyst Jens Butler describes it as "a two horse race to the finish."
HP has revealed further details of its previously announced $1 billion investment in offshore outsourcing, selecting six countries - Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia and the Philippines - as its global delivery hubs.
Those six spots are "best for our clients and best for where our markets are headed," says Robb Rasmussen, VP and general manager, Best Shore, HP Enterprise Services. (Best Shore is what HP calls its global services delivery strategy within HP Enterprise Services.)
The threats and challenges you face haven't changed much in the past year, but you're finding a better recipe for protecting your corporate data and networks, according to our eighth annual Global Information Security Survey.
The traditional IT outsourcing industry will be dead in five years, A.T. Kearney's Arjun Sethi predicted in a recent interview with CIO.com. The culprit? Cloud computing services. Sethi's vision of the future of the IT services industry is quite clear, but he's unsure of the specific implications this industry transformation poses to traditional IT outsourcing customers.
Most outsourcing analysts and consultants will tell you that the future of the traditional IT services industry is uncertain.
Insourcing - the process of bringing back in-house IT work that had been outsourced - is in style. Bob Mathers, principal consultant with Compass Management Consulting, points to recent high-profile IT and business process outsourcing initiatives that were brought back inside Chrysler, Delta Air Lines, Barclays and AT&T as evidence of the insourcing trend.
"We expect more organisations to seriously consider repatriation," Mathers says.
Increasing unease over the security of outsourced IT is leading CIOs to consider bringing management-related technologies in-house, reports Ovum.
Ovum’s latest Technology Trends survey found organisations are contemplating reducing the outsourcing of security and other IT management functions.
CIOs and IT managers know they must address concerns like security, compliance, service levels and end-user resistance when moving to cloud-based enterprise software, but they must not overlook a critical area: the feelings of their IT staffers.
Internal IT organisations choose to outsource for any number of reasons: to cut costs, improve service, increase efficiency. Increasingly, they're seeking innovation from their IT outsourcing partners, even though many don't have a clear picture of what innovation means in the context of outsourcing. Consequently, those IT departments are not getting much innovation from their service providers.
According to a 2009 Forrester Research survey, 38 percent of IT outsourcing customers said lack of innovation or continuous improvement was their greatest challenge with existing vendors - up from 33 percent the previous year.
Aspects of cloud computing have been available to - and rejected by - IT outsourcing customers for years, from hosted applications to on-demand hardware support. But as the breadth of the cloud has expanded to include a growing number of software-, platforms- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings that can be quickly deployed as needed with low management overhead and little vendor interaction, the temptation to move away from traditional IT services provisioning is mounting.
On the other hand, having your IT services in the cloud involves a host of risks, from data control issues to lack of transparency to the financial stability of new providers. Prospective cloud service customers must take into account a number of unique issues associated with cloud delivery in conjunction with the criticality of the software, data and services they're considering transitioning from a traditional IT services model, says Dan Masur, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of law firm Mayer Brown.
For all the vagaries of IT services, traditional IT outsourcing has always been quite tangible - servers, data centres, networks, specifications, man-hours, lines of code. The rise of cloud computing, however, is changing all of that with flexible, asset-free IT services available on an as-needed basis for more aspects of enterprise technology.
Cloud services are a boon for many IT departments willing to forego customization: They help IT organisations chip away at hefty capital expenditures from back-end infrastructure to customer-facing software and everything in between. Consequently, the cloud is turning the traditional IT services industry on its head.
Ten years ago in IT, Y2K had come and gone without catastrophe, security chiefs were grappling with the ILOVEYOU virus, and the dotcom bubble was bursting. But in the IT services industry, the year 2000 was notable for another reason - it was the year of the giant outsourcing deal.
A total of 24 IT outsourcing mega deals (multi-year contracts worth a billion dollars or more) were signed that year - more than the industry had seen before or since. All told, they were worth more than US$54 billion, according to outsourcing consultancy TPI. They included the EDS-US Navy contract worth $6.9 billion, the Bank of Scotland's $1 billion deal with IBM Global Services, and the $3 billion IT services contract between Nortel Networks and CSC.