Trends : Hands-off Outsourcing to Hands-on Outsourcing

Few years back companies in their earlier efforts to outsource with all its benefits of being able to focus on their core business most often outsourced services (IT services in general and specifically IT infrastructure services too) to a single vendor so that there was almost no IT staff required in their enterprise. The service providers brought in expertise --- operational and otherwise to work with business.

Over time several enterprises have evolved to realize that it may not just be a great idea to leave everything to a service provider (or even couple of them) and not gett their hands dirty. There are several challenges, many which come to fore over time due to need for continuity or improvements over a period which can best be championed and driven from within the enterprise to provide the best and most relevant content.

Many mid to large enterprises are now kind of going back to having IT staff, much leaner and with core responsibilities of making things happen working with service provider(s). This is bringing in a fresh change to business where IT department is able to step up and have more skin in the game and take responsibility not just for getting things done but also for doing the things that need to be get done.

This is possibly a natural evolution and comes as the proverbial middle path which offers best of both worlds --- there would increased IT staff wage bills but it comes with greater benefits of an improved business aligned IT services plan. Of course the thing many are struggling with is to get businesses to accept the improvement and provide inputs to put a tangible $$ value which can be used to further justify the change in approach by the CIO.

Knowing The Business Technology Services Supports

One of the common themes that most managers leading IT service teams struggle with (once they figure out that it is important) is the best way to get the technical teams to understand the business that is supported by the technology that they support.

In the depths of technical operations the technical folks get too technical to be the better and best. They are into commands and scripts and cross technology domain, but what takes a toll is the understanding of the business that they support. In several situations, this appreciation will add tremendous relevance to their actions or even create new ones if they can understand the business they support.

One of the  basic ways is to take them through the business environment -- like taking them to a retail store or a bank branch so that they can see the customers of that business enterprise, and how technology helps (and can struggle) when business faces it's customers. There are several other ways too but whichever way one chooses, there is no denying that this has tremendous impact on the way the teams then see their work.

The other struggle is to keep such awareness current and not to have it take a back seat in the technical and operational trenches. Successful managers have been able to do this through various means successfully (else, guess what, they would probably not be successful managers!).