Winning The Outsourcing Game Making The Best Deals : Making The Best Deals And Making Them Work

It has become increasingly difficult to hire and keep warm bodies, not to mention competent IT personnel. With this in mind, outsourcing ceases to be an option and becomes a necessity. Web hosting, application service providers, and integrating legacy and ERP systems are just three examples of when outsourcing is the rule rather than the exception. Winning the Outsourcing Game: Making the Best Deals and Making Them Work provides the background and a framework to help you develop a sound outsourcing strategy, choose functions to outsource, and effectively manage the risks of using third-party contractors to carry out your company's IT functions. Typical reasons for outsourcing go beyond simple contingent staffing. Outsourcing is about partnerships between providers and clients. For the partnership to work, the provider must know the business of the client as well as the technologies being outsourced. You need people with specialized knowledge or skills-both technical and industry specific-in leading-edge technologies that are not yet widely deployed. Outsourcing vendors serve as wholesalers of highly specialized talent. They are able to maintain economies of scale without regard to specialization. By deploying these highly skilled specialists to multiple clients, outsourcing providers can justify the enormous expenditures necessary to develop people with specialized skills. In order to fully employ outsourcing, IT managers must be skilled in such diverse areas as project management, systems analysis and design, contracting, and strategic management. Winning the Outsourcing Game provides a system for understanding these topics and utilizing them to optimize outsourcing relationships. It enables IT managers to develop a sound outsourcing strategy, choose the IT functions to outsource, and effectively manage the risks of using third-party contractors to carry out their company's IT functions. At some point, every IT manager outsources something. Empire building notwithstanding, everything from programming or system upgrades to entire business applications are outsourced. You outsource the work to get the task done; you cannot outsource the responsibility to make sure the task gets done correctly. The difference between success and failure depends on cutting the right deal and making it work. Winning the Outsourcing Game: Making the Best Deals and Making Them Work covers everything you need to know to make successful outsourcing decisions. "...provides everything the IT professional needs to know to make the decision of whether or not to outsource & to make outsourcing work once the decision is made covering both technical & strategig aspects of outsourcing." It has become increasingly difficult to hire and keep warm bodies, not to mention competent IT personnel. Winning the Outsourcing Game covers everything an IT professional needs to make the decision whether or not to outsource and to make outsourcing work once the decision is made. It includes detailed checklists for everything from drafting the RFP and contract to procedures for onsite contractors to project management and monitoring. It provides the background and the framework for IT managers to develop a sound outsourcing strategy, choose the IT functions to outsource, and effectively manage the risk of third-party contractors. This manual guides managers through the entire outsourcing process from making the decision to outsource to choosing a vendor and managing and controlling the relationship. There are case studies and checklists for all key aspects of outsourcing, both technical and strategic WHILE OUTSOURCING SOME OR ALL of information technology (IT) operations has been around since computers were first introduced into enterprises, IT managers are eyeing more current, compelling reasons to completely switch to an outsourcer.