In Digital, What was Context Now Becomes Core
I don’t know about your company’s situation; but having looked at literally hundreds of outsourcing contracts, I see that they all have something in common. The original intent was a one-time shift to transform and improve an operational aspect. Unfortunately, IT outsourcing contracts sort of poured concrete around the outsourced processes. Thus, the quest for operational excellence through outsourcing IT has the effect of stopping companies from changing. That’s a non-starter in the digital world.
When companies begin to rotate from legacy environments into digital technologies and digital business models, it’s not long before they realize they must fundamentally rethink their assumptions around the old ways of doing things. In those old assumptions, outsourcing IT infrastructure, development and maintenance and other IT functions made sense. The assumption was those functions were not core competencies, so the company should outsource to get efficiencies of scale and price points through leveraging the outsourcer’s core expertise. That assumption was usually right; the company transformed from Point A to Point B and achieved a one-time shift in improving operations.
