Conditions and Limits

Conditions and Limits

In principle, this concept seems to be transferable to other SMEs. The differences will be in the fraction of the outsourced services. This will mainly be influenced by:

• the absolute number of service staff,

• the complexity of the systems,

• the service times, and

• the geographical extension of the users.

A minimum of resources is necessary for tracking all tasks and for substitution in the case of vacancies or illness . The indispensable number of employees depends on several factors and cannot be rated generally .

The complexity of the systems is a main factor and influences the expenditure and the needed skills. A well- chosen infrastructure and IS architecture allows the reduction of this complexity. A typical problem is the increasing of complexity over the years , caused by the introduction of new applications or the co-existence of different software releases. This can be solved by consolidation projects.

The service times and the geographical extension of the users are influencing the expenditure, especially for the technical and the 1 ^st level support.

Besides these operative aspects, there exists a dominating general management aspect: It is necessary that the top management is convinced of the importance of IS for business processes and business strategy.

Results

• Outsourcing of IT/IS services is still an actual trend. It offers a lot of advantages, such as a short time to the introduction of new technologies or applications, a guaranteed availability, and so on. But the undiscriminating adoption of this trend tends to reduce IT on a cost factor and neglects the importance of specific IT knowledge for the continuous improvement of business processes.

• The establishment and maintenance of internal IT skills is important in any case, at least for assessing the possibilities for supporting business processes.

• The typical structure of SMEs does not fit to the offers of the large part of IT outsourcing providers. Typically these offers are tailored for large enterprises or international companies.

• A complete outsourcing has some disadvantages, especially for SMEs. The transaction costs will be relatively high and the potential savings will be absolutely low. Instead of a complete outsourcing it seems to be advantageous to externalize permanently only selected technical, non business-specific services.

• A selected technical architecture and the application architecture are laying the foundation for highly available, low cost IT. These factors - low cost and high availability - are more important for an enterprise than the immediate adaption of new technologies or of new products or product releases.

• The combination of general technical knowledge and specific business knowledge allows a focussed development of the IT infrastructure and an efficient support of business-oriented projects by the internal IS employees .

• The management of the IT/IS service group has to regard the sustainability of this department. Aspects of the sustainability are building up and securing actual and future needed skills, securing low support costs, continuing control, and benchmarking with best practices.

• The organization of the internal knowledge diffusion improves the quality of service and flexibility.

• The continuing feedback between user support on the one hand and planning and project work on the other hand enables broad knowledge about the requirements and allows a focused project management.

• The project work is the centre part for the development of the service group.