- Deciding Whether to Outsource
- Customer Satisfaction
- Definability and Measurability
- Financial Savings
- Sharing the Risk
- Delivery and Quality
- Scalability
- Stability and Variability
- Predictability
- Competency and Staffing
- Velocity (Reaction to Change)
- Key Messages
- Harris Kern's Enterprise Computing Institute
Stability and Variability
These two are among the most important factors to consider. Some of the most successful outsourcing ventures are with components of IT or applications that are very stable, mature, definable, and measurable. This is why legacy operations are a perfect example of how you can be very successful with outsourcing. Legacy operations usually have very little variability associated with them. By variability, I mean changing requirements, changing functionality, dynamic customer base, and so on. Variability drives change, change drives instability, and instability drives breakage, which drives cost and downtime, resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Think about the various pieces of your operation; those with the least amount of variability are those that are most manageable both from a delivery and a financial perspective.