Last friday I had an interesting discussion about “outsourcing” and I therefore decided to pick up this business-relevant topic in my blogsphere…
Fear of outsourcing your IT? Fear of terms like “Cloud Computing”, “SaaS” or “ASP”… Behind these buzzwords is nothing special, but proven and mature technology. The truth is in any case the fact that outsourcing is not just about IT, but also about the organization (personnel included) and its processes. If you have problems with your IT and your Business/IT-Alignment, don’t hope to fix them with outsourcing – it’s no charm.
But what are the advantages? Below I will mention only some:
- No need to buy and install physical servers and hardware
- No maintenance required, your provider is the “IT professional”
- Ready for use in short order, enable Enterprise 2.0 applications within minutes or hours
- Highly scalable, set up new resources immediately “on demand”
- You pay only what you actually consume
- etc.
And, the most important fact: In many cases, highly specialized providers understand more about safety, security and risks than yourselves. Beyond, they’re ISO-certified, have principles like “Safe Harbor” adopted and so on. If needed, your data will be encrypted – the employees defined by you are the only ones who have access to the information. The greater threat comes from the core of the company itself – of employees, media, lack of maintaining infrastructure, software, security flaws, etc. If Google’s, (sales)force.com’s, Amazon’s or Microsoft’s Cloud Services had safety or security deficiencies, these companies would surely have to give up their business soon…
But what need do you have? IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – ASP – Private, Hybrid or Public Cloud? Know your requirements: First of all, have a look at your processes. If you have determined which technologies support your core competencies, you can outsource those processes (services respectively) that are commodity. Define outsourcing-potentials by measuring attributes like strategic relevance, value, risk and criticality. There are a lot methods and best practices to find out about the technologies and processes that allow competitive differentiation of your company.
In the end, by outsourcing and cloud computing “only” competitive advantages can be achieved. According to the mentioned potential, it’s worth thinking about the topic. Do you need help to find the right provider, to set up the right contract or to evaluate your processes? Do not hesitate to contact me. Do not take the risk to “backsource” after months…
Current related articles are in following professional journals (extract):
- Fröschle, Hans-Peter (Ed.); Reinheimer, Stefan (Ed.): “Cloud Computing & SaaS.” HMD – Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Issue 275, October 2010.
Heidelberg: dpunkt.verlag, 2010 - Pagel, Peter (Ed.); et al.: “Software as as Service.” Wirtschaftsinformatik und Management, Issue 3 / 2010.
Wiesbaden: Gabler, 2011 - Buhl, Hans-Ulrich (Ed.); Bichler, Martin (Ed.); et al.: “IT-Service-Management und IT-Automation.” Wirtschaftsinformatik, Volume 53, Issue 1 / 2011.
Wiesbaden: Gabler, 2011