General Director tips - interaction with it during the crisis: what to outsource?

The crisis makes you save on everything. A company wants to maintain high growth rates and reduce expenses. IT outsourcing is a good idea for this, since 1 ruble of investments could save up to 2 rubles on the purchase of new hardware or software.

IT outsourcing undertakes a lot of risks and helps not only to save, but also to maintain and improve the company’s IT field. Sometimes it is hard to understand the complex variety of outsourcing services and solutions. It is important not to confuse what to outsource and what to keep.

1. To keep or not to keep.The most popular service among customers is a support for its end users who heed high quality and fast correction of technical problems. For an IT outsourcer this is a standard procedure of receiving and routing calls also called the Service Desk. Its main advantage is a two times reduction in the end user support cost.

Besides, the service improves user satisfaction. After all, users don’t just get fast and proper elimination of a technical problem but also a helpful Service Desk based on individual and truly human relations.

2. IT infrastructure management. In order to quickly respond to business changes, have flexible and transparent costs and most importantly — increase the company’s productivity, it is worth to outsource IT infrastructure management. This is not only and not so much the possibility to directly save on salaries and bonuses for IT employees but primarily the saving on indirect costs — purchase of licenses, maintenance, development of technology, cost of basic and additional personnel training, rent and utilities. And most importantly, it is the way to improve the quality of IT infrastructure, reduce downtime and number of failures for the infrastructure you outsource.

3. Application management and workplace support. The determining factor during the crisis is the efficiency of each employee, which, one way or another, depends on the availability and uninterrupted functioning of programs and applications. Sometimes your own IT department does not have enough resources for control and monitoring, and half-hour downtime of one employee results in multi-million dollar losses at a company level. Therefore, application management should be entrusted to an IT outsourcer: both to automate the deployment of applications and to reduce total cost of business applications and improve the efficiency of workplaces. Besides, this can reduce the risks of possible claims from vendors for the use of unlicensed software. The control of license usage is another nice bonus — if it turns out that your employee does not use a particular application, therefore, part or all of its licenses can be taken out of service, so you would not need to pay for them. In general, a unified approach for managing software will optimize many inefficient spending sources.

You can find the rest of the article and other expert advice on the website of the «General Director» magazine.