Outsourcing is a concept that is changing the way businesses operate, given its ability to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and improve the flexibility of an organisation, by enabling it to focus on its core business. However, while outsourcing offers any number of benefits to an organisation, it is not always the ideal solution for everyone.
According to Jeremy Malcolm, MD of Tectight Enterprise Technologies, outsourcing your entire IT environment to a service provider is not without risk. He says that relying too heavily on a single outsourcer to provide the necessary skills means it becomes difficult to disentangle yourself from them, even if their service fails to deliver properly.
So how can businesses take advantage of the benefits of outsourcing, without leaving themselves open to such risk? The answer, says Malcolm, lies in adopting a co-sourcing, rather than an outsourcing, approach.
“When it comes to the more commoditised services, such as desktop support, outsourcing is a perfectly reasonable solution. However, when you start talking about your high-end infrastructure, there is always a level of site specific knowledge that you want to retain in-house,” he says.
“Co-sourcing offers the best of both worlds, in that you can hire the experts to look after your infrastructure, but because your own people work closely with them, no irreplaceable knowledge is lost. This is crucial, because should you decide to change partners, you are able to do so without exposing your business to risk.”
Malcolm says there are many and varied reasons why organisations consider entering into a co-sourcing agreement. Generally, these are related to either a lack of skill within the business or an inability to retain the relevant skills.
“Skills are always an issue, particularly with smaller organisations, since their IT people are not usually specialists. They are expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, which means that they end up having a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things. Unfortunately, in the technical environment we work in, a little bit of knowledge is actually a dangerous thing.”
After all, he adds, when you are dealing with issues such as system availability and support, technology and firmware upgrades, not to mention patch management, you dare not make a mistake.
“This is why our customers choose the co-source option. They are able to utilise Tectight's range of skills as and when they require them, rather than paying for a dedicated resource that doesn't actually know enough anyway. Co-sourcing also enables the customer to tap into a much wider pool of specialised resources, while reducing their overheads,” continues Malcolm.
At its most fundamental, co-sourcing means that we will assist the client to get to a point where they can manage their technical environment themselves, calling on our skills only when needed. From a Tectight perspective, the company's key role is in the stabilisation of the customer's environment, but wherever skills are required, it can bring these to bear for the client.
“While we do perform monthly site visits as part of maintaining our relationships with customers, we are finding that as the co-sourcing relationship develops, clients become more comfortable with the idea of remote support. We gain access via a VPN and are usually able to sort out problems without having to be on site. This expedites the response time, enabling us to solve problems as quickly as if we were physically there.
“I think that the biggest benefit Tectight can offer its customers in respect of co-sourcing is the wide range of skills we have to offer. Our people are constantly gaining additional experience across a wide range of clients. These experiences can more often than not be applied to situations faced by other customers. This is of particular value to our smaller clients. What we have learned from working with enterprises can also be applied to their environments, meaning they avoid the sharp learning curve that otherwise accompanies such experience,” he concludes.
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