8 Benefits of Application Sourcing

First off, I hate the term outsourcing.  It has such a negative connation in today's IT arena.  I prefer the term sourcing, thus when talking to an IT manager or director we can have a conversation more about their direct needs.  It is always not necessary to outsource to a company, sometimes adding skilled resources is what companies need.  I feel that a flexible "sourcing" model is what customers are actually looking for.  With this in mind, what benefits can be gained? 

1. Innovation

Application Sourcing ensures that applications are optimally managed, allowing application development teams to spend more time on new innovations, allowing them to take important business decisions and provide support faster and more efficiently. Barriers between the teams are broken down through teamwork, fresh collaborative ideas and a smooth flow of information.

2. Increased performance

Application Sourcing reduces maintenance costs and intervals by synchronising design, development and testing efforts. Application Sourcing also significantly increases business performance and revenue streams by improving the availability and performance of critical applications.

3. Business continuity

Application Sourcing reduces the risk of IT downtime and other forms of downtime for both your business and your customers. The team also employs best practices, which helps increase efficiency further when developing and implementing systems. All of this allows your company to remain focused on your core business.

4. Platform stability

Application Sourcing accelerates development through simplified integration and interconnected systems. Through DevOps, improved cooperation and knowledge sharing between the Service Desk, Application Operations and Application Development, problems can be solved more quickly. Recurring problems are resolved conclusively and unnecessary escalation is prevented. This allows Application Development to concentrate fully on development.

5. Better end-user experience

Higher-quality applications will not only result in a better user experience, but also provide more productive business interactions with internal and external users. As a result, quality will improve and deliverables will meet the needs and expectations of the stakeholders.

6. Higher productivity

The monthly number of man-hours spent in meetings is greatly reduced in organisations with a proactive approach to Application Management. This results in a significant improvement in the productivity of IT staff, who are able to support twice as many business users per IT FTE.

7. Reduced need to rely on expensive, external experts

The biggest challenge for organisations with a compartmentalised organisational structure and spiral-shaped complexity is their increased dependence on expensive experts. Application Sourcing achieves the maximum result from investment in skills, processes and technologies. With so-called ‘factory-style’ end-to-end applicesion management, even junior support engineers can be more productive in less time.

8. Reduces total cost of ownership

Application Sourcing increases flexibility by reducing the time required to build and implement applications. An Application Management approach focused on end-user experience enables IT teams to improve efficiency because fewer IT staff are required to handle problems, which translates into lower operating costs because the number of problems and escalations decreases.

By constantly fine-tuning, it is also possible to minimise the impact of poor performance and reduce overall service costs by discovering hidden inefficiencies.