Every year in the world, companies spend over 3.5 trillion dollars on IT. External companies play an increasingly important role in it, because the world of IT services is evolving very dynamically, it focuses on specializations and guarantees better and better quality of services.
Global IT spending in 2017 increased by as much as 6% and exceeded USD 350 billion. According to Gartner, the mass storage demand for data centers by 2020 may increase by up to 3%, and technology will soon jump to the next level of development. Individual systems and devices will communicate with each other and even make decisions on their own. All this means that the modern approach to IT outsourcing is also changing dynamically.
Towards quality improvement
The IT outsourcing market reacts to any changes in the policy of cooperation between entrepreneurs and external companies. Until recently, the use of their services was primarily aimed at reducing costs. Outsourcing was a solution whose main goal was to reduce expenses related to employment and maintenance of IT department employees. Over the years, entrepreneurs’ priorities have changed. Cost reduction is still considered as one of the most important factors affecting cooperation with outsourcer, but at the same time, specialized services, the pursuit of innovation and quality improvement play an increasingly important role. This is evident from the KPMG report “A completely new world of outsourcing IT services”. Of the 450 companies that decided to outsource IT services, 26% did so due to cost reduction, however, already in 21% due to quality improvement and 19% due to access to specialist skills. This is due to from implementing more and more advanced systems in companies. Their service requires appropriate skills, so a specialist is needed, not necessarily an IT worker with general knowledge.
From centralization to Global Business Services
The change of entrepreneurs’ priorities is a factor that plays a key role in the transformation of support departments and many processes focused on customer service in intuitive platforms aimed at enhancing the brand’s value. Over 60% of large enterprises have globally centralized IT departments. However, the largest and most experienced players are already undergoing transformation to the GBS model, or Global Business Services. Centralization is not classified as investment in improving the business, and it is included in general costs. Almost 35% of clients, according to the KPMG report, are tasks that the IT function should belong to GBS, and over 20% consider IT as a stimulus for other business functions in GBS.
What does this mean for entrepreneurs? Global Business Services support multifunctional business processes and can manage the entire enterprise. In addition, they enable the provision of multi-channel services as well as process management. Companies increasingly focus on teams of specialists, not on individual units, which is associated with the cooperation with suppliers providing services required by various business departments.
To appreciate the Cloud technology
The next significant trend in IT outsourcing is the Cloud technology. The KPMG report prepared in 2015 shows that 60% of companies on IT with Cloud technology spend less than 10% of their expenditures, and 71% less than 20%. The cloud is one of those factors that effectively shifts services towards GBS. Already three years ago, it was assumed that it would play an important role in business changes, but the results of the report indicated that its implementation was very slow.
Experts from Commvault are of the opinion that cloud computing is one of the most important trends in the IT industry. High level of security, ease of access to solutions that are maintained on the basis of the cloud environment, as well as smaller and smaller investment barriers allowing its implementation are factors that have made outsourcing services more and more based on this technology.
Control the corporate governance
The constant development of IT also raises new challenges. Companies cooperate with an increasing number of service providers, and this means that they must control the corporate governance and increase control over the entire infrastructure of the company. They are forced to adapt to increasingly complex solutions, improve service management and relationships with contractors. This means that there is a need to invest in developing the competencies necessary to manage sourcing.
What today should pay special attention to companies that have decided to outsource IT or plan to implement it in the near future, is primarily to adapt IT functions to their business strategy and work with service providers on a strategic and less transaction level. It is important to focus on specializations and modern but proven technologies, such as cloud, as well as take care of corporate and IT governance.
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