Ask yourself this, “If I double my expenditure on IT, will it double my profit?” If the answer is “no”, then there are alternatives to bearing the brunt of purchasing new technologies. Managed IT services are an increasingly attractive means for enterprises to achieve their IT initiatives. But how can an enterprise identify services to outsource, what can they expect from managed service providers (MSPs) and how should they evaluate the services offered?

Stepping Down to Services

Finding any supporting services in your business processes that can be placed with MSPs may seem counter intuitive. However, if you ask yourself what are the fundamental activities or technologies at work in each one of those processes, you can see where individual and separable services exist.

Each process that you are trying to manage will encompass several steps – each with their underlying or enabling services. Those that differentiate your product or service and add to its value proposition will be strategic to your company. All others will be supporting services - although important to completing the business process, they are not strategically important to the end value of the product. Funding an MSP for these supporting services can provide operational and financial benefit.

Other categories to consider when identifying services for an MSP are those that are highly specialised or require high levels of expertise for a short time. For many specialised IT services, utilising specialists on a short-term contract is a fraction of the cost of developing and maintaining it in-house. Likewise, many MSPs can deploy the appropriate experts for each phase of an IT initiative as needs change, therefore keeping implementations on time and within budget.

The Right Service for Your Service

It is important to recognise that implementing and delivering a service is not a single event, but several steps that are constantly evolving. Noting what you need for successful service delivery at each stage: Plan, Deploy, Operate, Improve, and End of Life, will help you select suitable providers.

Plan

It’s important to get a full understanding of where you are starting from a resource standpoint and what other business services might be sharing the same resources. You need an MSP experienced not just in supplying new technology, but also in assessing the overall burden current business systems are placing on your infrastructure. They should be able to provide an assessment of the startup costs, level of effort required to establish the new service and a breakdown of the time required to setup any new technologies, as well as advise you on realistic expectations of service levels and pricing. The MSP should be able to give you an accurate inventory of your current infrastructure, its connectivity and performance levels, highlighting areas of concern with a clear action plan on how to address them as well as document current levels of service in order to properly set expectations.

Deploy

This phase takes the service from concept to reality. A suitable MSP will provision the hardware, software, and processes – configuring and putting them under management. Initially, this should be in a limited environment to validate assumptions made in the planning phase, ensure the infrastructure is sufficient, that an acceptable level of service can be delivered and to document that there are no adverse impacts on existing services.

Documentation is vital. An MSP that can provide real-time and historical reports of service performance and trending reports to show how the service will scale is critical. An MSP that can prove contingency plans based on data rather than “gut feel” is more likely to be successful even if unforeseen issues arise.

Operate

This phase is about getting value for money. A good MSP will provide regular communication so that you remain confident in service levels being received. Many MSPs mistakenly think that no news is good news. This is precisely when a report of bandwidth saved or network latency reductions can have you seeing them as a trusted resource rather than a monthly expense. Your customers will perceive and relay anecdotes of service outages or slow downs. An MSP that can meet those anecdotal claims with factual, data-driven reports helps you maintain your credibility and validates your decision to outsource.

A range of customisable, easily configured reports are vital for smooth service delivery. A good MSP will utilise web-based reporting dashboards to help you pull the precise data, on the fly that you need to satisfy your business units.

The capability of MSPs to provide alerting and proactive maintenance based on business-level impact analysis of outages or performance threshold threatening behaviour is critical to successfully sustaining your business process.

Improve

This is about forecasting trends to improve business processes and prevent degradation before it adversely impacts business profitability. MSPs should be able to provide historical and trending data about service operation - business-level metrics over time and in a format that’s relevant for your customers.

End of Life

The End of Life phase is merely the beginning of a new and improved way of conducting business. When it’s time to move along, you should be able to do it fast with minimal negative impact on your business. An MSP that can accurately assess the decommissioning of hardware and services – mapping their utilisation to impacted users and groups – will enable you to make better business decisions in the Planning Phase of the next BPM cycle.

Conclusion

After quantifying your IT processes into services, you can easily identify what services will be appropriate to outsource. A range of business services and MSPs are available to cost-effectively handle non-strategic services, freeing you to concentrate on differentiating your company. The right MSP should assess new technologies, reduce operational costs and improve profitability. A knowledgeable MSP should become an extension of the IT department. If you can rely on their continued communication and analytics, then you will be well on your way to successfully achieving even the most complex IT initiatives.