For many businesses, the question of how to manage their IT
effectively has increasingly become a choice between outsourcing and the use of
cloud solutions. These two methods
operate in different ways to achieve similar cost, performance and efficiency
savings.
Standard outsourcing solutions generally follow a linear,
transactional approach with the emphasis on large scale processes, stability,
reliability, and continuous business process improvement. Cloud solutions tend to be more
driven by two-way social engagement models - the focus is on listening to the
customer/user, assessing their needs, behaviour, sentiment and influence to
generate tailored follow-up actions, i.e., to drive customer retention or
acquisition activity. Both methods
have a place within the business environment, and current business demand is
relatively evenly split between the two approaches.
Outsourcing is often used by larger businesses with the
necessary scale and budget required to attract larger outsourcing vendors. This doesn’t exclude SME’s from
exploiting the business value of outsourcing but to achieve this, they may need
to consider aggregating business requirements to exploit the available
benefits. Contracts often involve migrating operational processes or functions
to a larger specialised partner, enabling companies to gain from reduced costs
and higher service levels supported by credits. The outsourcing approach often
realises these benefits through transactional strategies aimed at exploiting
economies of scale, optimising delivery costs, and creating structured
processes and systems with standard outcomes.
These outcomes introduce new business challenges, for
example, how to leverage smarter intelligence and real time social interaction
to enhance user experience and deliver innovation. To avoid disappointment and
manage expectations effectively, equal emphasis should be given to improving
customer interaction and user input, whilst remaining objective regarding
current issues which are transitioned and require supplier focus.
Consumption of Cloud services is driven by the ability to
adopt and evolve at a faster engagement rate than transactional-driven
services. The “sense and respond” approach can be tailored to absorb user
context and sentiment, for example, through multimedia channels, social
networking interfaces, and the use of real time resolution tools. These methods create and enable
environments to tap smarter intelligence and resolve key issues with a more
personal touch. But consistently
achieving the right level of service personalisation in a scalable and
manageable way remains a significant business challenge.
Businesses are often too descriptive and inflexible when
capturing technology requirements and attempting to deliver innovation and
continuous improvement to IT users. The needs and priorities of different users
vary, and should be factored into decisions on the selection of systems and
solutions. For example, some users
may prefer not to use real-time social engagement support tools, even though
they can help to speed up issue identification and resolution.
Support representatives need the ability, skills, and
systems to resolve service-related issues quickly to help maintain customer
experience levels. To deliver these next generation support systems and
experiences, businesses need to embrace Experimental and Personal Fulfilment
systems. (Larger
transactional solutions tend to target and measure efficiency at the point of
the central IT process instead of focusing on the quality of the customer
experience.)
Globally, significant investments are being made in
context-aware services (which use information about the user, e.g., location,
to deliver better customer experience) and decision support systems within
people-to-people networks. These
networks replace traditional user service desks, email and web incident tools.
Businesses need to experiment with these tools and methods to understand and
refine the most effective route to achieving innovation and personalised
fulfilment.
