The
average IT department will look radically different by 2010, full
of relationship managers and "touchpoints" between the company and
its outsourced suppliers, analyst group Gartnerhas
predicted.
Ian Marriott,
vice-president at Gartner, said that the trend towards outsourcing,
including the outsourcing of business processes as well as more
standard IT services, will involve a complete change of mindset for
the IT manager.
"The IT department
will need fewer technical skills and more business skills," said
Marriott at a roundtable event last week.
“Persuading
management of the need for outsourcing is going to be hard if a
company plans to do it properly because of the huge investment in
staff needed.”
"You won't be able
to retrain everyone in the IT department, and so you'll need board
commitment to spend the money up front. You should be spending at
least 5% of the value of the outsourcing deal on just managing that
deal, or it just won't be good enough," he said.
Marriott has
advised chief information officers to think of working towards "IT
Lite", where IT works as the glue between the outsource suppliers
and the company departments who need their services.
But the IT
department still has an important role, said Steve Prentice,
Gartner group vice-president of hardware and systems.
"At the moment,
everyone has these backdoor paths, ways that they get things done
by IT when they need them," he said.
The company has to
make sure it retains that to some extent, with lots of links to the
outsource company to make sure the communication is there.
"The over-riding
message is that failure to invest in relationship management means
outsourcing will fail," Prentice said.