On Wednesday 19th June, we delivered a CIO Roundtable from our Manchester City Centre offices focusing on how ‘SMEs Can Challenge Big Business Through Effective Outsourcing’, which was attended by senior IT leaders and business executives from a wide range of organisations.

During the interactive roundtable, attendees shared both their successes and war wounds of how they’ve embraced outsourcing as a way of adapting their approach to non-traditional delivery models in order to achieve a competitive advantage.

Adam Darr from Arrk, kicked off the proceedings by setting the scene as to how outsourcing should be seen no longer simply a cost-cutting tool, but instead is delivering true business value through measurable benefits such as enhanced service quality, reducing time to market and driving broader transformational change.

 

 

Achieving Success Through SMART Outsourcing – Gary Gautier, Director of Customer Success, Arrk

Gary shared his experience as both an ex-CTO as well as from leading customer projects at Arrk for the past 8 years. He highlighted through practical examples what he sees his secret sauce to outsourcing success is, with a key ingredient being to treat your ‘x’ as a partner and not a supplier. Also, how establishing trust and transparency on both sides will lead to a much more productive and fruitful relationship with value added for both parties, that’ll therefore help you deliver against company objectives, rather than making your business challenge ‘someone else’s problem’.

Gary’s secret sauce to SMART outsourcing includes:

 

Leveraging Outsourcing – David Threlfall, Group IT Director, Victrex

David then discussed how he has leveraged outsourcing to make his internal IT team at Victrex more effective and has helped them achieve an aligned business and establish a technology 3 horizon strategy. He explained how outsourcing has allowed him to re-align resources to make them more effective, rather than simply replacing people. And also discussed how it has enabled him to change the IT conversation from technology to core business objectives, including driving revenue, increasing profit and reducing risk.

A key theme of David’s insight was around the importance of effective change management when introducing outsourcing for the first time, for example he transitioned individuals from being traditional developers into architecture roles, and the importance of visibility and governance of the delivery process so that success can be both measured and shared.

David’s outsourcing highlights included:

• Digital is a must have and not a nice to have. To be respected you have to be in the game.
• Outsourcing can free up brain space to focus on making things better, rather than simply run.
• Don’t just focus on outsourcing external programmes – internal digital ecosystems can benefit as well.
• There will be hidden wins you don’t expect e.g. more predictable and improved support levels.
• Never lose sight that it’s all about people. Change can be worrying, so you have to prepare to manage it.

 

If you want to discover more about how outsourcing can benefit you, why not download our Outsourcing Brochure? Or if you’re interested in our next event, please click below…