Outsourcing is a business arrangement in which one business provides services to another business that could be or have been provided in-house. In the era of cloud computing, big data, and smartphone technology, outsourcing is a good option for a company that is lacking the necessary resources or budget to manage their software in its own IT department. There are several things that a CIO needs to consider in order to make the right IT sourcing strategy for their company. What are the main goals for outsourcing? Will you contract foreign or domestic providers? Well, in this article, you will be able to read about the IT sourcing strategy which is designed to give CIOs strategic management and advice for making wise decisions. Let’s take a look.
Cloud Services are sought by outsourcing-oriented CIOs
One of the most important build blocks of your IT sourcing strategy is cloud computing. The level of cloud service providers has increased drastically in the last ten years, which makes it difficult to sort through their various services. By storing your data on a cloud computing platform you can make sure that in the case of a natural disaster or a cyber attack, you will be able to access your data from a remote location.
Source: Equinix
IT sourcing terms that you need to know
According to the experts from Scoja Technical Services, before you decide on discussing your plans in a board meeting, make sure that you and your team know the IT sourcing terms. Some of the terms that you should know include business process outsourcing, e-outsourcing, insourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, multisourcing, and selective outsourcing. Let’s take a look at the short definition of each term:
1. Business Process Outsourcing – or BPO for short is a practice where one organization hires another one to do a process, task, or project.
2. E-sourcing – this requires buying information technology services or products that could be implemented in-house from one or a wide range of sources on the Internet.
3. Insourcing – insourcing is a practice in which the work that would be outsourced is actually performed in-house.
4. Knowledge Process Outsourcing – or for short, KPO is the assignment of a specific task or project to an outside organization or a different department within one organization.
5. Multisourcing – is an outsourcing approach, usually employed by larger companies, where the IT operations and the technology infrastructure is outsourced to several outsourcing providers, rather than keeping the in-house department.
6. Selective outsourcing – this is a targeted sourcing technique that relies on sending specific tasks that will be completed off-site while keeping other tasks in-house.
Source: Cloud Pro
Conclusion
For all information technology departments, balancing the need to keep the daily IT operations with pursuing newer projects and maintaining a budget can be a difficult and time-consuming thing. CIOs need to stay on top of recent changes and developments in outsourcing, but they will also need to know which outsourcing providers will work best for their IT needs, which areas need to be outsourced and which ones can be done in-house, and other things.
