This is a discussion site where clients, vendors and managed service providers can comment and write articles specifically on the subject of technology outsourcing or farming out your technology.

Technology is en essential part of everyday buisness infrastructure. However, the complexities, skills and management discaplines required to design deploy and manage a modern, secure and extensible IT infrastructure are becomming ever more specialised and retaining a fully skilled IT team is expensive, hence the trend for outsourcing or off-shoring.

Paying for shared access to these services and skills makes commercial sense for most businesses, and technology allows for the remote delivery of services enabling high wage ecomonies to take advantge of low wage economies.

This trend can be found accross the full range of IT discaplines, including software development, managed services back office outsourcing including document management, worklow, document scanning or imaging and data capture, these services can be applied to out-tasked solustions such as invoice processing and digital mail-room. Remote IT support and information security remain popular oustsourcing trends.

So what are the most commonly identifiable reasons for outsourcing or farming out your IT? 

In these challenging times cost is the primary driver for outsourcing, although this is a given, why else would you take the pain? The remaining nine reasons or benefits of farming out your IT can be summarised as follows:-

1. Limited in-house skills or expertise

The trend with many organisations that outsource their IT is to retain more generalist skills in-house. Keeping some level of expertise but using these technical skills to manage the relationship with their outsourced IT vendor. Here the internal skills become much more targeted managing the commercial relationship by defining and then managing deliverables of the partner.

2. Extending the skill-set

Even if you have an existing team in house, sometimes access to specialist skills can be difficult, do you need them full-time, if you do can you keep them busy and engaged in the business. Does this then introduce single points of failure or work bottlenecks and how do your manage success planning and provide coverage during holidays and sickness

3. Keeping staff engaged  and removing single points of failure

Many outsourcing organisations will have the economies of scale, supporting multiple clients, projects and these organisations simply will not experience issues in relation to attracting and then retaining the right skills. Commercially outsourcing companies can afford to pay higher salaries and therefore attract higher quality talent.

4. Improving overall productivity

Using an expert, or appropriately qualified staff to design deploy fix or maintain your It infrastructure is logically going to be more productive. Loading unqualified staff with the burden of learning and new environment or system will lead to a higher level of errors and it simply takes more time.

5. Keeping current with the latest technological trends

Technology changes and evolves constantly and at speed, leveraging an outsourcing partner with the economies of scale to support large shared teams of expert resources means that you can access these resources as required. In addition these outsourced teams will often work on multiple client projects bringing a wealth of practical implementation knowledge and experience.

6. Punching above your weight

By contracting in services from an experienced provider and securing access to this specialist resource your ability to innovate within your IT infrastructure should improve. IT is such a fundamental part of the day-to-day business operation and an organisations cost base, improvements in workflow, process or costs can deliver significant competitive advantage, just look at how the major supermarket chains have used IT to innovate within their businesses today.

7. Always on

IT management for many organisations is often a reactive affair, i.e. we will fix it when it finally breaks. However, any outsourced and managed service provider worth their salt will have the economies of scale to invest in both operational procedures and technology to proactively manage any IT infrastructure.

8. Information security risk management and compliance

In the age of service oriented architectures(SOA) the connected world we live in today, compliance is a growing challenge, regardless of the industry your operate in. Understanding your compliance posture and managing you information security requires strong data governance and data management expertise.

9. Stick to your knitting

You understand your business and your market, pick a provider that understands the technology and employ strong programme management skills to manage the vendor relationship and represent your views to your provider and your providers views to your team. This is a potent mix and is proven to deliver results.