Rapid advancements in technology are threatening and disrupting the core business models of companies in almost every single business sector. More established players in the enterprise are scurrying to keep up with new-age companies.
So says Shailendra Singh, business director Wipro Africa, who adds that digitally-empowered customers are another powerful force reshaping business models and entire industries.
He believes that because of these changes, CIOs face pressures from many angles, including complexity of growing service chains, end-user demands, budget constraints, adoption of new technologies and models in IT services delivery to name a few.
In order to cater for this myriad of business demands, the CIO needs IT outsourcing partners that elevate the relationship "beyond the tired and increasingly-outdated framework of a service level agreement (SLA) to business level agreement (BLA)", says Singh.
According to Singh, BLAs become the business plan that the CIO can sell within the organisation. It tightly aligns technology with the broader strategy and goals of the organisation in general.
He adds that it serves to address the "disconnects" to which many analysts have alluded - where IT remains a simple "order taker", and is not given the opportunity to add insights into business strategy.
"Within the BLA, the roles and responsibilities of each party need to be clearly articulated, key performance indicators are agreed upon, and clear penalty-based and incentive-based contractual elements are drawn up," says Singh.
He believes that at the heart of the BLA are tangible business goals; such as increased sales, increased customer retention, or reduced inventory holdings.
However, BLAs are not a quick-fix and cannot be implemented on a whim, he warns. "Developing a meaningful BLA requires the organisation to commit to an information and communication technology partner and strong governance layer that ties up business and IT together."
Singh believes that IT service relationship needs to be at a mature state, where the outsourcing partner has not only in-depth knowledge of the entire IT estate, but is also empowered to roll out a digital IT framework to foster the key principles of resilience, cost-efficiency and business alignment.
BLAs become contractible and achievable when this new digital IT framework is adopted within the enterprise, across all the core areas of infrastructure management, application management, security operations and cloud services, concludes Singh.
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