Of late, I have seen an increase in adoption of multi-sourcing or multi-vendor engagements by organizations across the globe, in order to achieve various goals, ranging from heterogeneous business requirements management to overall risk reduction and vendor lock-in avoidance. Even a recent study by IAOP & Information Services Group (ISG) Annual State of the Industry, states that “Multi-sourcing as an outsourcing approach increased by 75 percent from last year’s percentage.”
Outsourcing in general will continue to see growth in 2015, predicts the report ‘The Outsourcing 2015: Changing in a Good Way,’ by ISG. It says, “51 percent of respondents in the survey said they expect to pursue more outsourcing opportunities during the year.”
Multisourcing is the order of the day, but …
Customers tell me multiple reasons for embracing multisourcing — why they desire to work with multiple suppliers, both internal and external, with an end-goal objective of achieving an orchestrated ecosystem and to build a complete set of integrated IT services. Though multi-sourcing offers an appealing alternative to single vendor or ad hoc sourcing models, and does support strategic initiatives, such as cloud adoption or “IT as a service” organizations often times fail to achieve the right outcome.
This level of transformation, when moving from internal IT to multi-sourcing or from outsourcing to multi-vendor engagements, is one that is easier to embrace, yet very difficult to execute. Beside its meaningful end-goal and future focus, it also brings an extensive set of challenges, due to inherent complexities in portfolio management; huge variety of outsourced services models delivered by providers; and many-fold increase in touch points required to successfully manage the relationships. This sentiment resonates in the ISG whitepaper Agile Multi-Sourcing, which states that according to the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACCM) survey of large companies with more than US$1.3 billion in revenue, “89 percent saw the need for coordination among suppliers as a significant issue.”
The Dell Way
My Video: Multisourcing Made Easy With Dell, provides a brief overview of Dell’s approach and model to help customers achieve this transition. We help enterprises by providing managed integration services, as well as overall governance and program management, as a natural outcome of our years of experience in making multisourcing a successful reality not only for our customers, but also for ourselves, as part of our successful engagements with partners.
To ensure that a Multisourcing or multi-vendor engagement model works for your organization, there is clear need to conceptualize and build an entire structure that proactively addresses a specific set of critical challenges. One of the most important items is that, organizations need to ensure that the structure of the entire governance and delivery models that they build, to sustain a multsourcing environment is able to accurately map the clear requirements and specifics of your organization. This is key in ensuring that the right governance model is put in place, one that is able to move an entire enterprise and partners, into the right direction throughout the transformation. Also, building and maintaining a flexible and a highly modular partner network for your IT services is critical. A third item, often times ignored or under evaluated is the need of a scalable services integration framework, supported by both tools and processes, able to bring vendors and partners together into that orchestrated ecosystem and allowing you, as an enterprise, to receive services which are not only end-to-end measurable, but also predictable and continuously improving.
Five Pillars of Multisourcing Model
Relying upon years of experience and expertise in designing, building and managing the right multisourcing models, our goals have always been to ensure the best balance between efficiency, flexibility, innovation, and risk. To ensure that you and your enterprise achieves key business goals, our focus is on building, using industry and technology best practices, and applying business-aligned customizations across five key layers:
- Governance Model
- Business-Level Performance Management
- Management and Integration Tools
- IT Infrastructure Library Best Practices
- Continuous Improvement Framework
If your business is looking to streamline and finally achieve the desired integration between IT and Business, Dell can help you design, build, manage and continuously improve a successful Multisourcing Model. My whitepaper Enabling a Successful Multisourcing Model: A Dell Insight, has useful information you can use to find the best multisourcing model to meet your needs.
About the Video
Market behavior regarding the consumption of IT services has undergone a significant change in the last five years. Typically, enterprises approached outsourcing by either fully externalizing their IT department or just specific IT functions. This approach, combined with the ability to utilize offshore markets for the delivery of IT services, used to provide companies with a great level of agility and a competitive advantage in the market. Multiple drivers are compelling organizations to embrace multisourcing — the desire to work with multiple suppliers, both internal and external, in an orchestrated ecosystem and benefit from a complete set of integrated IT services. Watch the video to learn how Dell Services can engage with your organization to make multisourcing seamless.
About the author
As the Chief Technical Architect of the Global Solution Design Center, Bogdan Udrea provides support for Dell’s Large IT Outsourcing and Managed Services engagements, alongside with overall solution architecture strategy and governance, service strategy and service design. Prior to joining Dell in 2011, Bogdan worked as an IT architect, senior systems engineer and trainer for various IT technology companies. He graduated at The University of Bucharest and holds two master degrees in Computer Science and Information Security. He is based in the U.S. at Dell Services headquarters in Plano, TX.
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