The other month Read Write Web posed the question, “What is IT-as-a-Service and how do you determine its value for the enterprise?” My response was:
IT-as-a-service is yet another broadening phrase used to describe the commoditization of information technology resources. Over the years we’ve seen the IT products and services industry market themselves in ways that liken their products to familiar proven resources such as telcos and electric companies. Now the IT industry is leveraging these comfortable commodities to smooth over rough edges of IT as a whole and sell the world the whole shebang. When company X brings you “IT-as-a-service” they aren’t just bringing “storage as a utility” or “software as a service”, they are saying that they can do it all; top to bottom. While there is inherent value in having one throat to choke, and possible reuse of common resources there may also be downsides. Put another way, it is entirely possible that those touting themselves as providers of IT-as-a-service may be just saying, “We’re the jack of all trades, but master of none.”
My response was among the many which did not win, but it did get me thinking about the topic of IT-as-a-Service. Many of the traditional PC technologies that organizations are accustomed to consuming are being rolled up into a single annually renewed line item. In some scenarios these agreements hit the nail on the head by the wholesale offloading of some component in which an organization does not have the resources to address. In other cases, these agreements can leave business line staff holding the bag if there isn’t a technically savvy staff member to own and oversee the agreements.
Personally I’ve seen both sides of the coin. There have been scenarios where my company was the sole provider for all technology and services needed by our customers. I’ve also been one of those customers and have been in the position to chose which resources were to be handled by staff and which resources were to be managed externally. While I would bet there are many who have found a reasonable balance between outsourced services and internally managed resources, I have never witnessed these agreements pan out completely without concessions or compromises having to be made by some or all of the parties involved.
This is not to say all of these services agreements were bad; far from it. What I mean is, with agreements such as this, there will be times in which the customer has to own some component of the outsourced service they were looking to offload; or the service provider has to provide some varying level of support which does not fit the cookie cutter template they had intended to sell. I mention these points not to sound like “sour grapes”, but to convey the fact that setting realistic expectations is in the best interest of all involved parties.
If you are in IT or are responsible for managing some aspect of a hybrid services agreement, how do you weight the option of handing IT over to outside parties when the outsourced technologies are requirements of your core business operations? If you are not in IT, but facilitate your operation’s tech resources through agreements like this how do you find the services agreements that are right for your business and your staff’s ability?
Thanks Michael Babb for the review of this post.
