Mapping the Route to Business Transformation through IT Outsourcing

High-performance businesses, by contrast, use IT to drive performance enhancements across their entire organizations, increasingly using outsourcing as a key management tool to do so.

Accenture outlines the characteristics of this new approach to outsourcing, which can drive positive change and enable organizations to outperform.

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Accenture’s ongoing research into the role of IT in enabling high performance has shown that high-performance IT organizations are adept at a suite of activities that enable them to manage, deliver, monitor and measure IT functionality in a way that reduces costs and generates value. Among these activities are new approaches to service management and governance, industrialization techniques focused on streamlining processes and delivery capabilities, use of repeatable tools and methodologies, and comprehensive measurement programs.

In addition, outsourcing is becoming a key management tool in generating business value from IT, rather than simply “keeping the lights on for less.” Accenture has leveraged its research-based understanding and its tried-and-tested, pragmatic approach to create a road map to help companies reach their ultimate destination of IT and business transformation, particularly by leveraging IT outsourcing.

Accenture’s study, “IT investing for high performance: A global survey of CIOs,” shows that while IT attracts massive investment (in excess of US$2.8 trillion annually), companies have not yet gained adequate returns on the money they have spent. Further Accenture research into High Performance IT (conducted in 2005 and 2008) has mapped the defining characteristics of an IT function that is more likely to achieve long-term business results and enable high performance.

Outsourcing has a critical role to play in helping the IT function meet its broader mission of executing business strategy more effectively while enabling the flexibility and the capacity to innovate. Although IT was one of the first functions to be outsourced, business has yet to move beyond a merely tactical approach. Accenture believes that a fundamentally different operating model is necessary if companies are to attain high performance through IT—and a new type of outsourcing strategy can accelerate the process.

Accenture’s vision for this new approach has the following four key dimensions:

• Industrialized and optimized capabilities and capacity.
• Governance and service management.
• Transformational initiatives in leadership and culture.
• Advanced measurement programs.

As senior executives increasingly insist that IT services be aligned with business goals, organizations need to search for an outsourcing partner with whom they can collaborate, rather than a mere provider. Accenture recommends the following strategies to help produce an IT outsourcing arrangement geared toward the achievement of high performance:

• The commercial proposition to support such relationship must focus on an outcomes-based contract.
  
  
• The outsource partner should have experience in using advanced, multisourcing capabilities and services to help clients achieve high performance.

The IT function has an important role to play in helping an organization to achieve high performance, and Accenture’s experience has shown that strategic IT outsourcing can greatly speed up the journey to high performance.

Contact us to find out how Accenture can help your organization use IT outsourcing to achieve high performance.