Outsourcing to Gain Competitive Advantage

Lorrie Scardino
Research Director

There is a real air of momentum around the theme of this year's Gartner Outsourcing Summit in Las Vegas, "Results Driven Outsourcing." The intense pressure to cut costs via outsourcing has been replaced by a new value proposition - to use outsourcing as a way to gain competitive advantage.

Enterprises are focusing on aligning business objectives with the enterprise sourcing strategy, as well as developing sourcing management competencies to deliver enduring business results. New service delivery models are emerging in the IT services market, such as IT utility, and enterprises are seeing new choices available to them. One conference attendee said it quite well: "We were successful in reducing our costs by outsourcing, but we never got the results we intended to get. We can see now that by using cost reduction as the basis for outsourcing, we limited ourselves and backed into a collection of deals that were bound not to deliver the results we intended, because those results were not properly expressed. We need to align our business objectives with our sourcing strategy and rethink and reinvent the relationships we have with our providers."