Short takes from the Gartner Symposium
Gartner: time to stop compulsive
outsourcing
Gartner has urged businesses to "end compulsive outsourcing" in
a new book, Multisourcing, Moving Beyond Outsourcing, launched at
Cannes. The advice comes as major businesses continue to pull out
of outsourcing deals to bring IT services back in-house.
Last month, supermarket giant Sainsbury's dropped a £2.1bn,
10-year outsourcing agreement with Accenture, five years before it
was due to end. Gartner is urging CIOs to look beyond "quick-fix"
cost-cutting measures and instead enable capability building,
global expansion, increased agility and profitability.
Gartner attacks a series of myths about the benefits of
outsourcing, including the idea that sourcing decisions can be made
independently of business strategy, and that outsourcing offers
economies of scale. Gartner also warned organisations to face up to
"the myth of sourcing competency". Many organisations believe they
have the expertise to manage complex sourcing environments, even
when they have never done it before, the analyst firm said.
Consumers are the future, says Gartner
The increasing integration of technology into everyday life will
transform business technology, with control shifting from
corporations to individual consumers, industry analyst Gartner has
predicted. The company's vice-president and chief of research,
Steve Prentice, warned that ignoring this social context to the
adoption of technology was "a recipe for business failure".