Outsourced IT
Outsourced IT services are an attractive proposition, but how do you stay in control?
Whilst short term objectives might be quickly realised, many organisations under-estimate the cost and complexity of managing outsourced relationships. Without adequate planning, a thorough understanding of current IT service delivery, and due consideration to the long-term - expected benefits can be cancelled out by a loss of control and lack of overall IT service performance visibility.
Your challenges
Lack of visibility
Like many businesses using outsourced IT, your organisation will probably have an array of suppliers supporting your business. What results is fragmented service operation that doesn’t give you the holistic, joined-up view you need of your IT environment. This makes it very hard to gain an accurate perspective of how your organisation is consuming its IT, and ultimately, weakens your ability to take effective tactical and strategic decisions to best support the business.
Lack of flexibility and control
Long-term contract tie-in and rigidity of terms also restrict your ability to respond effectively to changing business needs. By not having timely, accurate information that enables you to rapidly respond to change, you effectively end up losing the level of control you need to support the business in a proactive way to deliver value.
Lack of innovation
With each of your outsourced suppliers focussing on their own arena, it is highly unlikely that any of them will be able to understand your environment and business needs in totality. Invariably, your suppliers will be focussed on managing cost rather than delivering increased business value and competitive edge. This means that you lose an important capability to proactively drive comprehensive innovation and "clear blue water" competitive advantage for the business. Without any clear understanding into IT resource consumption patterns and profiles, your organisation may find it difficult to develop a targeted IT strategy and investment plan that’s designed to keep pace with the future needs of the business. This lack of an established linkage between business operations, IT consumption and cost may also make it difficult for you to justify further IT investment to the business.
Hidden costs
Without truly independent visibility of consumption patterns and profiles and only your supplier’s reporting to rely on – you are left in a position where you have no way of corroborating performance and charges. Although you may have negotiated the best terms to meet your immediate needs, the changing needs of the business along with fluctuating consumption patterns may leave you exposed to inflexible services and premium charges.
Our service and what it can do
We address these challenges and more by supplying accurate reporting and impartial advice. Our approach connects and relates layers of systems and business data that exist between your organisation and the supplier’s - from low-level infrastructure components right up to business processes, transactions and the end-users - to make the relationships between them tangible and quantifiable.
- Joined up visibility
by providing ongoing, independent reporting that joins the dots, giving a complete and accurate picture of consumption patterns and performance. - Performance and SLA monitoring
by providing rapid insight and independent validation that suppliers are meeting the SLAs you’re paying for. Ability to rapidly action any deviations, arming you to take action as needed with ongoing reporting to renegotiate terms for the future. - Controlling and reducing costs
by providing visbility into the true consumption picture of your outsourced services, our service enables you to both control costs and gain evidence to renegotiate charges as required. - Right-size provisioning for current and future needs
by providing the quantified information and accurate scenario modelling that allows you to make effective strategic decisions and drive the necessary innovation to stay aligned to support future business needs.
Why our services are different
We provide a low-risk, high value subscription service that delivers the answers you need on demand - with no lengthy deployment or integration effort. Put simply, we’re specialists in delivering the rapid, accurate analysis and reporting you need to understand how your organisation consumes IT and effectively manage the operation of your outsourced IT services.
What you get
- We continually capture granular data from across your outsourced IT environment and business landscape – maintaining a dynamic, up-to-date representation and baseline of service consumption, cost and performance.
- Fed by your data and using our extensive modelling IP, we create and maintain an accurate model of your outsourced IT environment. exposing an accurate picture of how your business consumes IT.
- We analyse your environment intelligently, providing you with the insight that enables you to track capacity, performance, cost and SLAs and effectively manage your suppliers. We can also conduct extensive scenario modelling to inform your innovation and strategy agenda.
- We deliver our reporting in a format and frequency that works for you. Our findings are delivered in a variety of ways, including a tailored Web portal featuring cutting-edge visualisations and dashboards to direct dialogue with our analysts.
Further information
We explore the rising use of outsourced IT services and examine how IT Analytics can help IT organisations to gain a firm control of outsourced arrangements.
Download the white paper
Find out how Sumerian helped a major UK retail bank recover multi-million pound supplier costs. Read the case study