Bases for successful IT outsourcing

  According to the statistics, active market development of IT outsourcing in Russia restrains a variety of reasons:

• quality of the provided services;
• lack of the established management and cooperation;
• controversial price offers;
• security issues and technical restrictions.

Whatever attractive was the service price, the customer should be sure that, transferring to the external contractor of function of partial or complete IT support of the business processes, he will appear in a qualitative prize.

Data analysis, received from the Russian and foreign companies, shows that representatives of the domestic companies are afraid of the risks connected with a human factor, much more, than their western colleagues, and put them on the 4th place while the foreign companies put a human factor only on the 7th place [1] (research KPMG).

The choice of service provider takes quite long period. Based on researches, the choice of service provider took more than half a year 50% of participants, 30% noted that more than nine months looked for the suitable outsourcer.

From the very beginning it is important to customer to be sure that in staff of the outsourcer professionals work; that the principle of formation and measurement of the criteria of service quality reflected in SLA is quite clear and available to him; what the contractor is ready to bear not only formal, but also liability for quality of the work, including, for effects of its impact on the accompanying business processes and an end product or service of the customer.

Quality evaluation of the provided services is made by comparison of results of work of the outsourcer and division before transition to outsourcing.

The order of formation of cost value of service, certainly, should be clear to the customer, otherwise it can have suspicions of bad faith of the contractor.

The experienced outsourcer will always help to compare cost value and effectiveness of the considered service when working by own forces and by the outsourcer's forces.

Among the reasons of failures of cooperation the overestimated waiting from projects is also specified from the management of the enterprises customers. Therefore it is impossible to resolve a set of the interconnected issues:

• the organization of interaction with the external company;
• integration of external resources into internal business processes;
• preserving of service quality of end users.

As much as possible to prevent emergence of problems in the future, the company should allow the outsourcer to carry out complete IT audit based on which results it will be possible to make the complete list of the services which are required for this company. You should not neglect this process or to consider that the outsourcer just wants "earn additionally" once again.

Preliminary audit, on the contrary, will help both companies to save as it will save them from excess costs in the future.

At the outsourcing companies which have industry specialization business processes are already fulfilled and regulated, standard agreements about the level of rendering services (SLA) and the high level of responsibility to clients for quality of providing these services are prepared.

For customers the popularity and reputation of IT service provider, his experience in the market and industry expertize play a large role.

Good example is experience of the outsourcing companies with the status "1C: Franchisee" providing services in outsourcing of support and development of 1C.

Material is prepared on the basis of publications in media of 2009-2011: cnews.ru and ibusiness.ru