Linking IT Services Activities To Business Value

Linking IT services engagements, including outsourcing relationships, directly to any type of business value other than cost savings remains a challenge. However, it is a challenge sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals should get used to: Forrester's Forrsights data reveals that IT services decision-makers will face increasingly high hurdles to justify services and outsourcing engagements in the years ahead, even as they continue to emphasize unit pricing in their contract discussions with external providers. SVM professionals seeking to justify IT services will have to work harder to establish and explain the linkages between IT investments and business value and recognize the full value of specific vendor relationships. Help is coming from the vendor community: Several IT-centric vendors are pursuing methods to demonstrate linkages between business impact and even the most mundane IT services. But even short of a direct linkage to business value, SVM professionals can apply a variety of value drives to ensure that they get more business value out of services engagements.