Process model IT sourcing strategy

noventum designs process model for IT sourcing strategy

The reasons for the general development or revision of the IT strategy vary from company to company and are, in sum, extremely diverse: New, high demands are constantly being placed on IT, for which new services and functionalities are required. The risk and threat scenarios for corporate data are changing, data volumes are increasing and new compliance requirements are being imposed from outside. Within the company, employees and the associated know-how are changing. The business is taking new paths and requires IT support, especially with the help of outsourcing of certain areas, so-called IT outsourcing.

In order to position IT optimally to support the company's goals in the long term, IT managers must take a critical look at the benefits of the strategy of the company providing all services itself. It may be that outsourcing individual services or entire services is cheaper, faster or even more secure to manage. There is rarely a clear either-or decision. As a rule, a mixture of in-house and outsourced services is the way to go. In order to find the optimal sourcing strategy for a company, noventum has developed a process model that takes into account the individual company situation and includes a risk analysis of a possible outsourcing of specific topics.

In interviews and workshops, all parties involved develop scenarios, evaluate them based on individual criteria and develop a decision template at the end, which will bring advantages to the company.

This procedure is divided into three phases. In the first phase, the conditions for the framework, the requirements and the objectives are defined, and the organization's starting position is described. In the second phase, various scenarios are developed from this, various performance sections are planned and evaluated on the basis of developed criteria. In the third phase, the scenarios are then enriched with the necessary information and transformed into a decision template for the respective business.

THE PROCESS MODEL IN DETAIL:

Phase 1:

At the beginning, the focus is essentially on recording the individual initial situation and thus being able to ensure successful support.
The internal as well as the superordinate objectives are weighted, terms of the framework conditions and scope for design are clarified. In parallel, the services and tasks are analyzed (e.g. by means of a service map), the existing contracts and the cooperation models. In addition, the commercial data and the organizational structure are recorded.

Typical overarching goals are:

• Reduction of costs
• Improvement of quality
• Increasing flexibility
• Development of special expertise
• Realization of compliance and security requirements

PHASE 2:

In the second phase, possible courses of action are developed, evaluated, and documented.
To this end, the standard market content of the services and tasks as well as the company-specific or strategically relevant and company-critical services and core competencies are first identified. Sorting and structuring the components into different "production depths" facilitates subsequent processing.
The services are then evaluated in terms of performance (strengths and weaknesses analysis). By sorting the tasks and services, they are placed in a coordinate cross and possible performance cuts are made.

Options for action are derived from the results collected. These are roughly outlined. In a next step, scenarios are evaluated on the basis of criteria derived, among other things, from the previously identified objectives. After weighting the criteria, the individual scenarios are evaluated and a ranking of the scenarios is created.

PHASE 3:

Target scenarios are developed by describing and evaluating possible sourcing scenarios. These scenarios are the basis for a decision template.

The decision template contains the following elements:

• Presentation of the objectives with ranking
• Presentation of the scenarios with description of the target images
• Presentation of the collaboration models
• Description of the advantages and disadvantages of the scenarios
• Presentation of the cost-benefit analysis
• Assessment of the outsourcing capability
• Assessment of the controllability of the model
• Description of risks
• Rough cost projection compared to actual costs
• Presentation of the procedural consequences
• Presentation of the temporal consequences
• Presentation of the personnel consequences
• Description of the migration scenarios
• Recommendation for action

Once a decision for the optimal sourcing strategy has been made, noventum consulting provides support in planning and preparation, tendering, negotiation as well as transition and transformation.