The Outsourcing Paradigm
What is the reason that many organisations do not pursue any form of outsourcing as a means to drive cost reduction and efficiency improvement? Could it be that past experience directs their thinking to major outsourcing projects using one of the leading vendors?

Whilst major outsourcing projects deliver substantial benefits to many businesses, others find that they have no appetite for the scale and scope of a whole process outsourcing deal. It may be that they consider the risks to be too extreme or that they believe that their business strategy requires them to maintain direct control over IT infrastructure and other similar entities.

There could be another approach.

Are these the same organisations that are quite comfortable outsourcing the fleet management of their company car fleet to a leasing company but would stop at the door of the IT department?

In specialist business areas, especially where there are support and management processes that are both complex and infrequent - to the point where they cease to be easy for staff to manage, it makes sense to adopt a strategic approach to outsourcing and to use specialist providers.

One example is the SWIFT infrastructure in organisations with modest levels of SWIFTNet traffic. The outsourcing paradigm may have ruled out outsourcing of the SWIFT connectivity to a SWIFT Service Bureau. This is one area which will often be consuming scarce IT resource in complex and infrequent support, configuration and upgrade tasks. The connectivity cost savings alone can justify a project of this nature, without the IT resource savings – thus freeing IT resource to improve the support levels on critical business processes.