Category:Uncategorized
Managed services keeping businesses up-to-date
Technology is moving quickly. In fact, every 12 to 18 months, computers double their capabilities, and so do the information technologies that use them. With the speed and convergence of emerging technology solutions like cloud, mobility, social, and big data, there are naturally new pressures on IT organizations to enable the transformation needed to become – and continue to be – a more digital, responsive business for their customers.
There needs to be an acknowledgment that to grow, IT should focus on supporting the legacy core systems and applications that run the business, and also charting and implementing a roadmap for the future. This roadmap needs to leverage technical transformation and innovation to open up new revenue channels, respond faster to market needs, elevate levels of service and introduce more dynamic cost models.
IT leaders have an opportunity to step back and evaluate the strengths and skills within their teams to determine where their internal focus should be; either maintaining the core environment and ‘keeping the lights on’ or shifting over to help develop and guide their transformation journey.
Most organizations realize that to elevate current service levels and accelerate change, they need to engage a managed services partner that can bring expertise and experience to help meet their state initiatives.
By this, I mean managed services partners that can bring more than just traditional cost-savings through global delivery and ‘lift and shift’ approaches. They need a partner that has differentiated knowledge to better optimize and enhance how they provide service. Ideally, an approach that offers a new economics of IT for managed services.
Clients are trading in the mega outsourcing deals with one vendor for multiple relationships, where they align workloads with individual partner expertise to capture next quadrant benefits across the enterprise.
Historically, businesses rely on IT, but doesn’t involve it interactively throughout the process; they typically become the ‘do-ers’ at the end of the process. A ‘Services as a Broker’ approach fosters strong collaboration and involvement by the business with IT early and often, to ensure costs are allied with the business value the project will realize.
To determine where a managed services partnership can add the most value, IT leaders should assess where they want to go, and where internal resources and external partners fit into that journey; it’s being able to balance day-to-day running with innovation elsewhere that gets organizations ahead.
