This article appeared in the November 2007 issue of Legal Technology Insider. The original can be viewed by clicking here
Outsourcing your IT infrastructure management is a major decision for any IT director and its going to have serious and lasting implications. If it goes right, you can significantly cut costs, enhance service levels and generally make yourself popular with the fee earners. If it goes wrong, you could be letting yourself in for a world of recriminations and failed projects. With these two end games in mind, what can the legal IT director do to ensure that he’s the one who gets it right?
Whether it’s dipping your toe in with some offshored helpdesk or going the whole hog by sending all your IT to Mumbai, accessing low-cost overseas human resource is increasingly seen as the next logical step in IT procurement. However outsourcing isn’t like any other IT purchase. Yes, you need to look at the capabilities and costs of competing vendors but the implementation process isn’t just matter of throwing development time at it. You need to think not only about the technical and strategic ramifications but also about the softer, more relationship-focused aspect of the process.
The comparison I always try and draw with outsourcing is with a marriage. The engagement between outsourced provider and client is, whether you like it or not, going to be a relationship. It is (hopefully) going to be for the long term and will require give and take on both sides. So, when you’re setting up your outsourced relationship you want to think about how that marriage is going to work.
The marriage contract
Law firms are notorious within the IT world for the emphasis they place on the contractual aspect of relationships with vendors. This is right and good but is something that is particularly relevant when you are thinking about establishing a lasting and effective working relationship with an outsourcing vendor. Because the relationship between you and your outsourced partner is necessarily going to be iterative and developing, you need to consider that, whilst contracts do oblige partners to deliver on their terms, they can also restrict or disincentivise those partners in equal measure. If you tie your outsourcing partner up in a web of delivery commitments and SLA’s you could actually find that you are preventing them from going that extra mile and delivering you more or that you are stifling their creativity in delivering the best possible solution. Going back to the marriage analogy, when you’re getting married you don’t want to start the relationship by arguing over a hugely detailed pre-nuptial agreement. Yes, you want to have a shared understanding of the rights and responsibilities inherent in the marriage contract but you don’t want to stifle what is hopefully an organic relationship by the imposition of restrictive obligations and limitations.
A long courtship
The marriage analogy can also be taken further when considering the way in which the relationship between client and outsourcing vendor should be developed. In the general scheme of things, we don’t normally select a partner and then immediately marry them. Normally a period of time is spent in getting to know and understand the partner fully before committing to the totality of a married relationship and the same should be true of the outsourced IT engagement.
Whilst the temptation with outsourcing is to go the whole hog and offshore as much as possible as fast as possible, it is a process that has to be taken carefully and thoughtfully. Rather than selecting a partner and committing to an in-depth relationship, you should initially go on a few dates – perhaps giving them a peripheral, non-customer facing aspect of the department to manage. If that goes well you can move onto a more involved ‘engagement’ and then onto the commitment of a fully featured outsourced IT marriage. In this way you can be assured that not only can you trust the vendor but that the relationship is well bedded in and functioning before the full weight of the partnership is brought to bear on it.
Married life
The marriage analogy might be an extreme example but it does serve to illustrate a key point anyone thinking about outsourcing needs to consider. Outsourcing is not about buying a service and just plugging it in – it needs to be considered at a deeper level. The nature of outsourcing means that it involves people and relationships and the best way to make it work to your advantage is to ensure that those relationships are fully functioning.