That’s good news in tight times, but bottom line benefits only go so far. “A marginal improvement in a non-core process’s efficiency pales in comparison to other boardroom imperatives,” says HfS Research Founder Phil Fersht.
To Fersht’s point, 30 per cent of the survey’s respondents said outsourcing is not effective at all in gaining access to new business process acumen, 31 per cent said it is not effective in delivering new technologies, and 35 per cent said outsourcing relationships fail to provide new and creative ways to achieve business value-also known as innovation, that holy grail of outsourcing.
The problem with Fersht’s suggestions is that IT service providers aren’t likely to change their approaches unless buyers demand more from them. Therefore, IT outsourcing customers who want to move beyond cost cutting must put business value at the forefront of their outsourcing arrangements. Here are four ways to accomplish that goal:
1. Stop taking the low-cost bait. Cost cutting deals will deliver cost cutting. Period. “If you can’t calculate the value created for the business by [outsourcing] the function, don’t sign-up for it,” says Fersht. “Labor arbitrage isn’t sustainable value and should be excluded from value calculations.”
2. Contract for value. Real business value gets short shrift in most outsourcing deals. “Success isn’t measured by the number of full-time employees [on an outsourcing account] or the quantity of transactions. It is measured on contributions to corporate objectives,” Fersht says. “Make that the basis of the commercial relationship between buyers and service providers.”
3. Have the courage to change. Be willing to abandon processes and technologies that don’t deliver, says Fersht. It won’t be easy, but the true benefit of outsourcing is taking advantage of the millions of dollars the service provider has invested-and that you haven’t-in best-in-class systems and processes.
4. Look beyond SLAs to business outcomes. Service level agreements are important but business value is tantamount. Work with your provider to create outcome-based metrics for the relationship to supplement the deal’s operational SLAs. “We encourage buyers and service providers to institute monitoring of leading key performance indicators and adopt formal root cause analysis processes,” Fersht says. “In this manner, issues are detected before they become critical, and once detected, can be eliminated forever.”