IT Outsourcing SWOT Analysis

Strengths

                IT Outsourcing is handling over an non-core business activities  in the organization to the experts that can be focus daily on the activities and give the organization a competitive edge of the competition in industry.

                The Strengths of IT outsourcing is a big reduction of risks. When the activity in the organization is done by outsourcing it is huge reduction of risks since the outsourcing company must be expert on that outsourced activity, meaning the organization doesn’t need to learn, take a risk for something non-expertise,etc on it. Then, agility. It is about how flexible the activities be done the the organization and push the boundaries from IT perspective, and the way how to spin up the new services. The works need to be flexbile to do, but also need to secure.

                Outsourcing the activities can be done properly which giving the company an advantage on the quality, the usage of resources/costs, and high probability of successful.

Weaknesses

                Before decided to choose IT outsourcing there are many things that needed to be considered, as example the trust/faith the customer to use the outsourcing company/partner, the trusts could be gain from how the company market their business, make their company being known by people, make sure the quality of services are satisfying the customers,etc.

                The weaknesses of IT outsourcing the controlling. when the company choose to outsourcing, they were unable to control the activities remotely meaning lost of control for internal, second is the costs, then the quality of services. Since not all outsourcers are same, they have their own way to solve/run the activities in their business. The overall way to solve those problems is hire the consultant which will impact to the future.
                Next weakness is industry knowledge, when the company outsource the activity in their business the staffs of company could be lost their knowledge and experiences in that outsourced activity, since they wont be able to do their job like before. Then, the next weakness is the remote controlling costs times to monitoring and regular visits.

Opportunities

                IT Outsourcing can be defined as removing non revenue or non fee owning activity within the company business, it is about handling over non-core business to the partner/other expert company to create value.

                Elements of IT that being outsource are :

1.       Deliver actual physical compute

2.       Hosting and deliver the application out of data center.

3.       Deliver the IT to end-user.

4.       Involves to create value chain and profit for the business.

Opportunities comes from when the outsourcing is executed properly, and not just hosting the IT for the client. Outsourcing give the clients to get the opportunities for the latest technology meanwhile they are outsourcing their non revenue activities, outsourcing beats the standard hosting type that has been offered. Outsourcing could be say as “properly” when the partner of outsourcing  understand how to deliver IT to the client/end-users, somethings like different applications and infrastructure could cause un-proper outsourcing activities. They need to focus to the value to add when outsourcing and take the advantage of the strategic.

Threats

               

                There are things to caution about IT outsourcing, the biggest things is choosing wrong partner. It is recommended to use famous outsourcing partner. Next thing is about security of outsourcing, security is a weakness/threat when the company choose to outsourcing some of their activities. When the partner do their job there are gonna be a lot of data that being input and output, meaning they can access the company’s data.

                Big threat of outsourcing is the SLA (Service-Level Agreement), some partner might have their own Service-Level (quality) their services could be not able to fulfill the client/company’s need. It is the cause off wasting time and money.

                The company should focus on SLA and what they truly need, so they can choose the partner to outsource their activities based on their needs and SLA. Although it is not relevant for the company but it is recommended to do. Because if the company really want to their needs are fulfilled they should do their activities on their own instead of using outsourcing, because every partner outsourcing have their own application, infrastructure, methods, etc on running the acivities.

                Outsourcing let the client to release the full/partial control the activities and give the full/partial control of the activities to the partner that better than the company/client. So the outsourcing could be done properly and created the value for the company/client.
                Make sure that if company want to better/best value for outsourcing don’t hestitate to pay more, because something cheap doesn’t always good, although expensive too could not be good. Meaning when the company want to outsourcing, they need to consider the budget and expect what they get with that budget.

                Prepare the plan for outsourcing project start by integrity potential, when the activitiy in the business is being outsourced, there is a probability where the partner have their own application to solve the problem. The client need to anticipate the integrity based on the preparation plan before outsourcing to prevent the obstruction in the managing the activities.