Large organisations have become increasingly reliant on the application infrastructures that support their business operations – they cannot afford even a moment of downtime. Retailing, trading and internet banking are some obvious examples where any infrastructure failure to applications or hardware spells lost revenues or stunted growth. For these organisations the availability and continuity of their mission critical applications have become their strategic resource and competitive advantage.
And that’s our focus – maintaining 100% functional availability of these applications through a deep-rooted risk management and right first time culture, while keeping pace with business demands for innovation and regulatory compliance – all critical to business success.
Senior engineers in the front line
Anybody who has been involved in IT outsourcing will be familiar with the phenomenon of first-line, second-line and third-line support: only once the problem has been escalated will the senior engineers be called in.
For more generic applications this support structure may be sufficient, but it simply doesn’t work for business critical applications where even a minute of downtime could mean significant revenue loss. Therefore Schuberg Philis turned the model on its head, bringing senior engineers with decision making capability right into the front line and forming a collaborative and consistent team with the customer and its partners from day one. See the Schuberg Philis way in pictures…
Schuberg Philis transforms mission critical outsourcing from service support to service delivery with an emphasis on change and risk management.
Solution-driven
Schuberg Philis is a solution-driven company – based on the Sharma, Lucier and Molloy (Booz Allen Hamilton) definition where a real solution is a fundamentally different approach that creates additional value for customers and suppliers by meeting five criteria:
- It is co-created by customer and supplier;
- It integrates products with services to meet essential customer needs;
- Suppliers accept some of the risk, often through performance-based and/or risk-based contracts;
- Relationships between suppliers and customers are unusually intimate, far beyond a traditional buy–sell relationship;
- As a result, solutions are tailored to each customer.
We believe that this solution-driven approach is the future, especially for selective outsourcing. Teams of specialists come together, bringing the requisite skills, experience and knowledge to bear on the challenges presented in delivering mission critical applications services. Market trends support this conviction.
CIO as service broker
Customers are looking for changed attitudes from the outsourcing service providers they work with. It is not only going to be a matter of cost reduction and the service provider just being the recipient of a customers’ to-do list. One size no longer fits all. Customers expect service providers to build cooperative and collaborative teams of specialists, and to jointly create as much cost efficiency and value as possible across the whole service chain.
Organisations have now come to view outsourcing as a different operating model that uses multiple sources — some internal, some external, some near shore and some offshore. According to Gartner, CIOs have become service brokers, rather than direct suppliers to their organisations.
Market trends identified by Schuberg Philis and leading industry analysts include:
- Outsourcing will continue to trend toward shorter-term deals with more specific requirements;
- Buyers want to purchase more point-specific solutions, instead of just getting rid of the headache of infrastructure; now they want to get something out of it;
- Outsourcing agencies will focus on their particular areas of expertise and look to partners for help;
- Even the largest service providers are starting to pick their poison, recognizing they can’t be excellent in every segment of every vertical;
- Some of the larger outsourcers are beginning to farm out parts of projects, much as a general contractor hires subcontractors.
Multi-sourcing is all about co-creation and partnership within a clear governance and risk management structure. It’s about total collaboration. Success is not in the scale but in the relationships, the way we offer our services, our organisational processes and in our specialist expertise and craftsmanship.
