Thinking of outsourcing your Service Desk? What are the key considerations?

When you are considering the above, you are basically trying to make a decision to “BUY” or “BUILD” the service desk. In some cases, you may already have a operational Service Desk but outsourcing the function may still be considered.

Some of the generic considerations that applies to the above are:

• Availability of existing in-house processes and procedures, tools. Maturity of existing Incident and Service Request Management processes, including the availability of  Configuration Management System and CMDB, documentation, defined roles and responsibilities.
• Availability of existing people with necessary skills and knowledge to set up and operate a Service Desk, including the supporting procedures and tools.
• Setting up a Service Desk, with an integrated Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management processes with the associated CMDB and knowledge database takes time. It may be easier and faster to outsource the above to an established provider.
• In some cases, intellectual property (IP) and security of know-how within the organisation needs to be properly protected. Outsourcing of the Service Desk to an external party may risk the breach of information security, privacy and confidentiality of information. This could be against existing policies or regulations.
• As in any outsourcing, one of the advantage is that internal IT staff can focus on their core business and leave the day-to-day operation of the Service Desk to the third party. However, high level of management attention and focus may be needed in the beginning to ensure that the third party is meeting contractual obligations.
• The Service Desk is an important touch point by IT to its customers/users. One danger of outsourcing the Service desk to a third party vendor is that vendors may be primarily driven by profits, and less focused on delivering a good customer experience.
• Vendor may have limited knowledge of the internal services, application and culture. This takes time to acquire. So, effectiveness and efficiency plus ability to deliver customer-focused, personalised service may be limited at the beginning.
• Finally, cost will be an important factor. Outsourcing to a third party can be considerably cheaper if the third party vendor can enjoy economies of scale and passes the savings to their customer.

All the above are some valid considerations and there will be other specific factors to consider that are unique and dependent on each organisation’s business needs and strategy. The decision should fit into your overall IT delivery strategy which should be aligned to and/or supportive of the overall business plans.