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Balancing the Risk and Reward of Outsourcing
The best outsourcing agreement for your organization is not necessarily the one with the lowest price. Your primary goal when negotiating and structuring an outsourcing contract is to develop an agreement that achieves your business objectives not just on day one but throughout the entire term.
This white paper will help you understand the overall construct of a good outsourcing contract so that you can make certain you balance the overall risks and rewards in order to receive the services you need, at the levels you require, and within your price constraints.
Multi-Vendor IT Sourcing, Avoid Management Pitfalls
Decision making on a company’s IT sourcing comes down to the respective strengths exhibited by responding providers. While a total outsource of IT operations involves core and non-core infrastructure, applications maintenance and development, customers discover that one provider’s strength is another’s weakness and vice versa.
Further, applications are often awarded to more than one provider to leverage experience, business and regional strengths. Desktop maintenance may even be sourced by the outsourcing provider to a partner to expand its breadth of delivery capability, or the provider may manage the company’s agreements only to replace them if they acquire better pricing and service delivery. In today’s environment, cloud services do not have to reside with a company’s current outsourcing partner.
Procurement departments are challenged to negotiate lower prices and therefore may attempt to achieve price savings through multi-vendor sourcing. However, the cost may be greater in the long run taking into consideration risk, complexity and greater internal cost to manage the agreements. Still, many companies source their IT operations to more than one provider and successfully execute. The key is to avoid the common pitfalls of vendor management.
This article lists some of the reasons for successful multi-vendor IT sourcing.
Proven Provider Selection: Eliminating the Turkeys
Although outsourcing is considered a mature business strategy, many transactions either fail or have to be renegotiated within the first two years. Inadequate provider selection techniques (often driven by clients and endured by providers) are significant contributors to such failures.
This research paper explores the effects of sourcing failure, identifies several common mistakes found in typical client efforts and suggests a proven provider selection technique that counters each mistake and helps assure sourcing success for both parties.
5 Keys to Getting a High ROI from Provider Site Visits
One of the many steps in provider selection and evaluation for large outsourcing deals is visiting the vendor at one or more of their locations. When done correctly, the value and experience gained from a site visit is well worth the investment in time it takes to plan and execute the visit.
This article offers tips and hints to make the most of your provider site visits...
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