To achieve digital transformation – which is to say, to be and remain competitive – in today’s digital world, enterprises and public sector organizations need an organized, well-informed and hyper-responsive approach to meeting their requirements. Advances in technology make the possibilities nearly limitless, but a company can’t do it all by itself. Increasingly, they seek partners to deliver next-generation IT services to help them improve their operations and grow their business.
To find the right partners and negotiate winning contracts, organizations need to have their finger on the pulse of the market; they need to know what is possible and which providers can deliver it. And they need a fool-proof and fast-paced way to find service providers that can best solve their specific business problems and support their transformation.
This is why ISG has taken the best approaches from our thought leaders, field practitioners, data labs, legacy firms and other industry assets to create a whole new approach to sourcing: ISG FutureSource™.
Read the Top 5 reasons today’s enterprises need ISG FutureSource™:
- You need more agility. Today’s market is no joke. The speed of business is only accelerating, and service provider partnerships need to be flexible and creative to help you keep up. An interactive and iterative process – including several highly structured collaboration and alignment sessions – allows teams to design solutions in an agile fashion and contract them to increase enterprise-wide agility. In the context of sourcing, moving fast and moving deliberately cannot be mutually exclusive.
- You need more experience. To know you are getting a solution that meets your technology and business objectives, you need to collaborate with potential providers and make sure the appropriate expertise is at the table. This is the only way to make fully informed decisions that will allow you to react to market forces in real time. Once the team is happy with the mutually designed services, these solutions can then be rapidly translated into statements of work with specific best practices for service delivery. Without the benefit of experience, the buyer isn’t likely to get the most out of the sourcing arrangement.
- You need more innovation. The most innovative solutions in the market today may not be from the first provider companies that come to mind. When you are trying to solve specific business problems, you need to understand not just what is available but what is possible from the market today – and what each candidate provider has already achieved for their clients. As teams come together to work through a series of collaborative sessions, additional innovation and new possibilities bubble up. This collaborative approach helps the teams build trust and align with one another.
- You need more value. It’s only when an enterprise and its prospective service providers are truly aligned on the sourcing strategy and business objectives that the relationship can reach its highest potential. To get this right, decision-makers need to use current market research and proven methods for producing sound decisions. Businesses today expect more from their sourcing initiatives than just reducing costs. The value of the relationship lies in true business partnership so both parties achieve success.
- You need more confidence. IT is no longer a support to the business, it is the business. This means relationships with IT sourcing providers carry more weight now than ever before. Making a wrong decision or even just missing out on the exact right one can have lasting implications. Your security, efficiency, compliance and productivity are counting on it. Getting outside expertise for increasingly complex decisions to support the internal procurement office is the single greatest predictor of sourcing success.
ISG FutureSource™ is a new sourcing methodology built on best practices from years of experience and the latest market data. It helps buyers make well-informed decisions about services critical to their organization’s success – decisions that are especially important in today’s newly digital and hotly competitive market. Read our recent white paper Collaborate to Innovate: The Future of Sourcing Begins Now or contact me to find out more about ISG FutureSource™.
About the author
As a director in ISG’s IT Sourcing and Advisory Services group, Jamie Burke helps clients define strategies and capitalize on cloud, analytics and digital technology trends. He has recently assisted numerous Fortune 50, 100 and 1000 clients in M&A technology strategies, application rationalization, cloud, next generation network and co-location solutions and transformation initiatives. Jamie is ITIL certified with a BA in MIS from Notre Dame and an MBA with a concentration in Portfolio, Program and Project management from the University of Texas at Dallas. He served for 10 years as an Airborne, Air Assault and Ranger qualified US Army Field Artillery officer.
About the author
