Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This Executive Report challenges the presumption that outsourcing IT services is inherently better than performing the same work within the corporation, and makes a case for alternatives to full or partial outsourcing. Over the past 15 or 20 years, the concept of sourcing a variety of IT services from outside vendors has developed into a major business endeavor for both supplier and end user alike.

Coming out of nowhere, blogs have become commonplace in today's Internet-connected world. Only a few years ago, social media, like blogs, were strictly the province of hard-core geeks. But now, grandmothers, public relations (PR) flacks, and teenagers have joined the digerati, posting their political views, their cookie recipes, and their innermost thoughts on the newest boy band, and sharing these posts with friends, family, and the wide, wide world.

Why does your IT department outsource? Is it to achieve a reduced cost of IT services? Or is it to obtain best-in-class services? Does outsourcing improve the productivity and efficiency of the services you deliver? Does outsourcing increase IT's ability to help increase revenues? Does outsourcing make it easier to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements? Or is it all of the above?

While commonplace today, only a few years ago social media technology, such as blogs, was strictly the province of hard-core geeks. But now, grandmothers, public relations flacks, and teenagers have joined the digerati, posting their political views, their cookie recipes, and their innermost thoughts on the newest boy band, and sharing these posts with friends, family, and the wide, wide world.

This Executive Update is the second in a series that examines information and communications technology (ICT) outsourcing and its various configuration options. The series is based on a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 73 organizations in 25 countries across the globe. 1

Although text mining technology has been available for years, its use has mainly been relegated to intelligence agencies, news providers, wire services, and other organizations whose business primarily centers on the handling or processing of large volumes of textual information.

Sun Microsystems has released its operating system (Solaris 10) and Java Enterprise System (JES) under a new subscription scheme in which the customer gets the entire enterprise software stack for free, and support is charged on a per-employee-per-year basis instead of the typical per-processor-per-user model. The JES contains Sun's portal server, application server, identity server, Web server, clustering software, and some other similar products.