Outsourcing
According to the most recent researches, Italian IT market is passing through a phase of uncertainty and such phase represents the right moment for investing in the growth of our own companies. Among all possible countermeasures, outsourcing appears to be one of the winning instrument for those medium and small businesses seeking for facing today’s negative economic situation.
Compared to other European and American countries, the Italian delay in terms of IT investments is very significant. Even if we compare Italy to some emerging realities such as India or China, Italy remains a tail-end.
It is true though, that the economical and strategic advantages of outsourcing are visible on a short and medium term, starting from the optimization of human resources to a much more rapid time-to-market.
In order to obtain an high ROI or a ROI adequate to the company’s needs, outsourcing has in fact to be intended and planned as a strategic choice.
The phases to be followed in an outsourcing plan are basically three:
- The identification of the business processes intended to be outsourced and to be therefore handled and followed outside the company;
- The economic assessment of the outsourcing plan;
- The planning of an adequate agreement with reference to each phase or level that will be included in the outsourcing plan through the definition of some basic points, necessary to determine the success of the project.
The fundamental aspects that must be included in the agreement are:
- An economic and qualitative assessment of the targets we aim to achieve;
- The appointment of some Key Users, both internal and external, to be included in the project;
- The definition of a program for transferring and handling the company’s data;
- The identification of sensitive and critical data that cannot be outsourced;
The major advantages that an adequately planned outsourcing action can bring are:
- A correct assessment of the costs, a datum which can indeed show significant variations if the task is given to internal staff;
- A much shorter product time-to-market, since Yarix is subjected to the terms of the agreement signed;
- A very narrow risk of losing important data and information, both because data theft are often committed by unsatisfied internal staff or by employees about to be dismissed and also because the company can seldom afford structures for protecting its own security as competent as those guaranteed by a dedicated company;
- A more effective control against both internal and external industrial espionage;
- Human and technological resources available 24h a day 7 days out of 7, since Yarix is bound to the outsourcing agreement;
- Speeded up emergency response times;
- A guaranteed service and system scalability;
- An highly skilled staff working on the outsourcing plan; a staff that claims long experience in the field of work and an heterogeneous knowledge;
- The client can concentrate itself on its core business;
- Lowering of the costs for internal training programs.
Outsourcing might also have some side effects deriving mainly from an external management of the corporate assets and/or from technological limits such as, for example, the unavailability of broad band access in the territory where the company is located.
Companies have to carefully assess the outsourcing introduction: while such strategy could be able to widen the gap with other competitors, mostly extra European countries, a groundless contraposition to any outsourcing project could cause a loss of a market share mainly due to the stagnation of business processes that might derive from scarce specialization.
