Fueled by business changes and changes in IT, application portfolios have become increasingly heterogeneous. A growing demand from the business and a decrease of supply in the IT labor market pose new challenges to the CIO. Now that external sourcing options for application services are maturing, a growing number of organizations take a more structured approach to application sourcing.

A persistent mistake regarding outsourcing is that it transfers the responsibility for “providing the business with the IT services it needs against best prices and conditions” to an external supplier. True, the CIO no longer manages IT people and IT processes. That does not mean that the CIO responsibility in terms of budgets, outcomes and risk management is reduced or becomes any simpler. On the contrary, we might say the desired IT outcome and cost levels have to be achieved within the context of a commercial relationship and the contracts defining it, instead of exerting direct control on IT operations.

Legislative compliance and the continuous rat race for higher quality and lower cost are some of the topics that keep the average IT manager from having a nine-to-five working day. And this despite the availability of a multitude of models, approaches and best practices claiming to be the golden egg your IT organization has been looking for all this time. And now there is the well-known ISO-goose claiming they have laid another egg: ISO/IEC20000.

Economic downturn and IT outsourcing pressure the IT budgets and IT organizations, and do not seem to be the partner for business process outsourcing deals. The need for justification of the value of IT seems to be more important than ever, but business & IT managers do not seem to make the value of IT transparent. Possible causes of this problem are insufficient knowledge of the IT Business Model and insufficient knowledge on how IT impacts the business performance.

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is very logical, and Implementation of Process-oriented Workflow (IPW™) seems not too complex and is although more comprehensive, is also logical. Nevertheless, organizations often have huge challenges when it comes to implementing ITIL and/or IPW. Often the intended result of the organizational change, the improvement of the services delivered to customers of the IT organization, is not achieved.

IPW™ is a method for implementing a process-oriented workflow in IT organizations that has been used by numerous companies already. Traditionally, the focus of IPW™ has been on the management processes (operational and tactical), but over the past few years, the scope of IPW™ has been broadened to include the strategic and development processes as well.

The fundament for successful outsourcing of Information Services (IS) is largely built during the preparation. Developing a long-term service delivery relationship between parties, however, is not so easy. Besides the design of the desired relationship and the selection from among available suppliers, attention should be paid towards the steering and control mechanisms of the outsourcing relationship.