Partner Article

The growing trend for outsourced IT

Robert Rutherford, founder and Managing Director of QuoStar Solutions, comments on the growing trend for outsourced solutions.

IT outsourcing is something that has been slowly gathering speed for a number of years, but the current downturn has provided the catalyst that the industry needed to turn this progress into a ‘trend’.

Historically, the common perception has been that outsourcing can help to cut costs and that budgeting is the sole motivator for the decision to outsource. On the contrary, in a well run IT department, cost shouldn’t be driving these decisions. For many CIOs, it is a decision that is grounded in firm logic.

IT has always been a complex beast, with many different variables and considerations. As progress in the industry has sped up over the past 15 years, this area has diversified even further. As a result, IT solutions have become even broader and more complex, and in many cases have moved on too quickly for internal staff to keep up.

For small and mid-market organisations, this raises a number of questions: How can you attract and retain good quality IT staff who possess the specific skills that you need? How can you manage them and keep them on the edge of the wave, so that they can deliver a clear return on your spend? These are difficult questions, but outsourcing can often provide the answer.

To compete, companies need to be agile, they need to be resilient to failure, and they need to have the ability to access information efficiently. In order to achieve these goals, many IT departments are now using outsourcing to obtain the specialist skills that they are lacking in-house, rather than simply to slash costs.

Some companies may outsource the whole IT function from the service desk to the CIO, whilst others will outsource elements as externally managed services to allow capable internal members of IT staff to focus on delivering further value to the business. Either way, strategic outsourcing can help the vast majority of businesses to achieve their business goals more easily.

One of the most influential trends within the broader outsourcing landscape has been the rise of cloud computing. The cloud has certainly opened doors to IT outsourcing, for both IT professionals and business leadership. Cloud is enabling smaller and mid-market organisations to gain access to technologies and systems they never could have afforded in the past. It’s also allowing larger organisations to scale up their operations much more easily, without having to worry about any huge capital expenditure on hardware.

Outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean the total removal of staff within an organisation to simply reduce costs. Outsourcing works best when a considered approach is undertaken. It shouldn’t be about exchanging control for cash flow. When used effectively, outsourcing can actually provide much more control, as well as time and expertise, for both business leaders and the IT teams.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rostrum .