Strategic IT Sourcing:
Enhancing Decision-Making
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Successful IT sourcing relies on strategic, informed decisions that drive business value. In stressed time-windows, organizations are making long-lasting decisions on their IT investments. Yet, many organizations struggle to make collective, well-informed IT decisions in a timely manner. This paper explores decision-making challenges during IT sourcing and proposes practices to orchestrate smarter, more impactful IT decisions.
INTRODUCTION
For IT sourcing to be successful, organizations should get these decisions right. Incorrect, or even poorly processed decisions can result in needless IT investments, cost overruns, problems in delivery, dissatisfied users, exposure to risks, lack of compliance, challenges in client deliveries, as well as missed and missed opportunities.
Decisions made during an IT sourcing process have often long-lasting, wide-ranging consequences for the organization. Commitment to start a new initiative, agreement on the scope, selection of technologies and vendors, as well as decisions on methods and roadmaps can have major implications to the organization's operations and business. In some cases, like with extensive ERP programs, the decision made relatively early in the sourcing process can impact several critical business processes and even company's business performance. These decisions will also have major impacts on people's daily work and employee experience.
From the initial idea to signing the contract, organizations must navigate a range of decisions, such as:
- Is this a real business opportunity for us?
- What is the scope? What are our key requirements?
- What are the latest innovations and best practices we should tap into?
- What is the optimal timing for this initiative?
- What technologies should we consider?
- Which service providers have the right capabilities to help us?
- Which part of the work should we do internally? What skills do we need?
- Who from our own organization should be involved in the preparation? How about in the implementation?
- How to engage our internal stakeholders to ensure the success of the initiative?