If the end to end process was focused on delivering the optimum business value for the minimum cost, a great of wasteful and ultimately meaningless chatter and activity could be avoided. As has been said time and time again, delivery of value requires co-operation between customer and supplier, not confrontation. The enlightened customer will recognise that a good supplier needs to make a working profit in order to continue to deliver the services which benefit the customer’s business. Customers get defensive and aggressive in negotiation when there is suspicion that suppliers are not being open about rates of productivity and improvement.

If there is less money around for IT projects and services, then those providing such services need to be looking at ways and means of doing more for less. It is our observation at SMS that there is immense scope for this in most organisations.

At IBM, we’ve been running virtual environments and delivering shared processing services (e.g. mainframe and storage) for years. Our customers want the benefit of reduced costs but not at the risk of compromising the integrity and security of their processing and data. Requirements from our clients are rigorous and rightly so. Access controls must be tightly managed, enforced and verified by compliance and audit procedures.

As virtualisation extends its reach to the desktop, wider platforms, the network and into cloud based services, we should consider potential environmental implications. It’s interesting to note that the UK government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (currently under consultation) considers carbon emissions from an bsolute and individual organisational level. There are a number of implications here for outsourcers, our clients and the environment – a slight tangent but this will definitely become a key consideration. Happy to discuss!

So often such an exercise points up areas where time and money are being used to support things that aren’t actually all that critical to the business. It can also point up some interesting re-prioritisation of spend to have a bigger effect on overall efficiency.

Its an area we have a great deal of experience in and have developed a toolkit to enable organisations to carry out such a study pretty quickly and painlessly. Its well worth doing, because the resulting savings can be dramatic.

Mike McCormac

Let us tell ourselves that we create the market – the market did not create us.

Let us take some positive actions – let us create consortiums and share the joy as well as pains, resources and win – within the consortium and work like a joint family – like a group company – do they have guts ?