Driving IT Value in a Multisourced Environment

To manage this multivendor environment and enable high performance, companies are increasingly using a service integrator. Based on its High Performance Research and unmatched experience, Accenture outlines the characteristics of such a service integrator and the benefits it can bring.

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Businesses are continually raising their expectations of the benefits to be achieved by using IT to drive high performance and generate business value—while reducing cost.

Over the course of the past decades, CIOs have evolved their IT infrastructure outsourcing strategies. During the 1960s to 1980s, organizations often used a sole outsourcing provider that was focused on reducing the costs of the existing IT environment (“your mess for less”). In the 1990s, the approach became more sophisticated. CIOs moved toward multisourcing in order to gain the agility and flexibility required by their businesses’ changing demands.

Multisourcing, the current de facto standard, requires the IT organization to manage several service providers, thus creating a complex “supply chain.” Adding to this complexity are trends such as:

• Growth in the use of personal digital assistants and BlackBerry smartphones, imposing new requirements for the management of content.

• Added pressure for differentiated service levels that distinguish between the needs of revenue-generating business units and those of internal cost centers.

• The advent of new technology approaches such as virtualization, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS), which Accenture’s research shows are being adopted by high performers.

Managing this complexity is challenging, and requires IT organizations to move away from the accidental architecture that is created by serial, unplanned sourcing strategies. In the last three years, the market has seen a potential answer to this challenge in the emerging concept of multivendor sourcing that is enabled by a single vendor acting as the service integrator.

To assist companies in managing their multivendor IT outsourcing environment to enable high performance, Accenture has drawn on its ongoing High Performance Business research program and unmatched experience to outline the characteristics organizations should look for in a service integrator. Service integrators should provide one or more of the services themselves, possess an integrated framework of methodologies and tools for industrializing processes, and also have a track record in this area.

Service integrators must deliver an IT service management capability that is:

• Consistent with the requirements of an integrated IT operating model.

• Managed through a comprehensive set of governance structures.

• Executed in accordance with a standardized set of roles and responsibilities.

• Held to service level agreements and other metrics.

• Executed through a balanced scorecard to drive change.

• Built on a set of standard, industrialized IT processes, using a core set of standard tools and IT service management practices to drive transformation that delivers operational excellence. Service integration builds on recognized practice models like IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) to achieve this goal.

In this way, a service integrator should deliver the following benefits:

• More consistent service at higher service levels.
• Lower operating costs.
• Lower switching costs and greater supplier flexibility.
• Enhanced innovation.

Read more about Accenture’s groundbreaking High Performance Business research initiative—and how it helps organizations deliver bottom-line results.

Contact us to find out how Accenture can help your organization use multisourcing to enable high performance.