IT services. Equipment - Part 4. IT Professional Services. IT outsourcing
I wrote in a previous article that people for IT services are not a prerequisite, since they do not participate in the creation of utility. But none of the IT services at this stage of technology development can not do without people.
There are two root reasons for this:
To be more precise, different people can predict the behavior of other people with varying degrees of accuracy and different time horizons. But there is no one who does it with 100% accuracy and with a horizon of more than a couple of years. As a result, over time, more and more life situations cannot be handled by systems that support the IT service.
As a result, IT services must be complemented by people in order to:
To meet the need for people, the owner of an IT service has two options:
If you decide to use professional services, then the next task will be to determine the set of services that you will need. To better navigate the professional IT services, I’ll give several approaches to categorizing them.
Given that the core value of professional services is the presence of a supplier of people with deep competencies who have received special training, an obvious way to categorize is to divide the services into areas of competence. On the example of the ICL Services website, this approach is used for the main categorization of services in the menu and on the “Services” page .
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Often it is difficult to choose from the services defined in this way. Comes to the rescue by categorizing the IT services assets that the relevant professional services help maintain in effective condition. Using the example of the ICL Services website, this approach is used on the page “Assistant in the selection of services” :
Since change is a landmark event for IT services, it is possible to share IT professional services in relation to change. Thus, they can be divided among themselves on:
“Where are the IT outsourcing services,” you ask?
To be precise, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals , outsourcing is not a category of services, but a level of development of business relations between the supplier company and the customer company.
The outsourcing relationship is long-term, which implies that the company-customer has strategically decided to abandon owning its own facilities for the execution of work, choosing to purchase services in the market of affordable suppliers as a replacement.
On the other hand, outsourcing relationships are results-oriented, which means that the supplier takes responsibility and part of the risk for people, processes and technology along with the responsibility for ensuring that they together provide the results specified by the customer in the contract. Responsibility for results, and not only for resources, is what distinguishes outsourcing from narrower and more traditional types of transactions, such as contracts for manning people or contracts for individual tasks. Results usually imply the achievement of operational performance in terms of customer processes.
As can be seen from the above explanations from OPBoK, outsourcing is, in fact, a qualitatively higher level of maturity of services, implying a full transfer of more costs and risks to the supplier, which manifests itself in a qualitatively different description of the supplier’s responsibility in the contract .
Providing services for the IT operation phase is a key sign that you are in an outsourcing relationship. Otherwise, how can you be responsible for achieving operational performance? Among other things, the outsourcing relationship is characterized by much closer contacts and the ability to quickly expand the interaction.
The topic of IT outsourcing is not limited to professional services and can also include IT services.
There are two root reasons for this:
- Technical components fail over time and need maintenance;
- IT services are used by some people, and designed by others. And people, in turn, are unpredictable for each other:
- They do not always behave predictably;
- They are unpredictably wrong;
- Their needs change unpredictably.
To be more precise, different people can predict the behavior of other people with varying degrees of accuracy and different time horizons. But there is no one who does it with 100% accuracy and with a horizon of more than a couple of years. As a result, over time, more and more life situations cannot be handled by systems that support the IT service.
As a result, IT services must be complemented by people in order to:
- Restore its performance after unhandled technical failures and environmental changes;
- Assist in resolving unhandled situations in business processes;
- Design an IT service;
- Make a change in IT service.
To meet the need for people, the owner of an IT service has two options:
- keep people on staff;
- use professional IT services.
If you decide to use professional services, then the next task will be to determine the set of services that you will need. To better navigate the professional IT services, I’ll give several approaches to categorizing them.
Given that the core value of professional services is the presence of a supplier of people with deep competencies who have received special training, an obvious way to categorize is to divide the services into areas of competence. On the example of the ICL Services website, this approach is used for the main categorization of services in the menu and on the “Services” page .
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Often it is difficult to choose from the services defined in this way. Comes to the rescue by categorizing the IT services assets that the relevant professional services help maintain in effective condition. Using the example of the ICL Services website, this approach is used on the page “Assistant in the selection of services” :
Since change is a landmark event for IT services, it is possible to share IT professional services in relation to change. Thus, they can be divided among themselves on:
- IT consulting services - services that are used in order to understand and decide what needs to be changed;
- Services for IT projects — services that are used to perform individual significant changes (for example, a migration service from Windows XP to Windows 7 or a software development service) , and
- Services for the operation phase IT services that are used to solve permanent problems for a long time, including the implementation of minor changes (for example, support for workstations running Windows 7 or maintenance and support of applications ).
“Where are the IT outsourcing services,” you ask?
To be precise, according to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals , outsourcing is not a category of services, but a level of development of business relations between the supplier company and the customer company.
The outsourcing relationship is long-term, which implies that the company-customer has strategically decided to abandon owning its own facilities for the execution of work, choosing to purchase services in the market of affordable suppliers as a replacement.
On the other hand, outsourcing relationships are results-oriented, which means that the supplier takes responsibility and part of the risk for people, processes and technology along with the responsibility for ensuring that they together provide the results specified by the customer in the contract. Responsibility for results, and not only for resources, is what distinguishes outsourcing from narrower and more traditional types of transactions, such as contracts for manning people or contracts for individual tasks. Results usually imply the achievement of operational performance in terms of customer processes.
As can be seen from the above explanations from OPBoK, outsourcing is, in fact, a qualitatively higher level of maturity of services, implying a full transfer of more costs and risks to the supplier, which manifests itself in a qualitatively different description of the supplier’s responsibility in the contract .
Providing services for the IT operation phase is a key sign that you are in an outsourcing relationship. Otherwise, how can you be responsible for achieving operational performance? Among other things, the outsourcing relationship is characterized by much closer contacts and the ability to quickly expand the interaction.
The topic of IT outsourcing is not limited to professional services and can also include IT services.
Exercise A4:
- On the ICL Services website, in the Applications and Infrastructure sections, find the services that, by description, can NOT be services for the IT operation phase, as defined in this section.
Sources:
- Outsourcing Professional Body of Knowledge v9.02 (OPBoK). Section 1.2 "What is Outsourcing?"
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290564/
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