4 key steps for optimizing your IT services portfolio

From the CEO’s perspective, an optimized IT services portfolio maximizes cost efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. It enables the organization to focus on its core business while managing risks and accelerating time-to-market for new products and services.

From the CIO’s perspective, an optimized IT services portfolio ensures strategic alignment with business goals, enabling the organization to allocate resources strategically with a focus on projects that directly contribute to those goals because CIOs have access to expertise and specialized skills not readily available in-house.

Highly optimized portfolios leverage outsourcing to ensure that commodity-based sourcing is offloaded to outsourcers, freeing up internal teams to focus on strategic projects that add value and effectively manage costs.

The challenge for most organizations, however, is knowing how to assess whether their IT services portfolio is properly optimized. The following steps will help enable IT leaders to assess the current level of optimization in their IT services portfolios and understand the impact future demand will have on maintaining or improving the overall services portfolio.

1. Analyze your distribution of spend across service types

Demand for third-party IT services continues to rise despite ongoing economic challenges. Companies continue to look outside the organization to staff critical roles and major projects with third-party IT services talent.

Taking stock of the distribution of services across service types will expose imbalances within service areas and opportunities to assess the strength of spend allocation across your provider base. Armed with multiple views of your IT services spend by vendor, services type (consulting, advisory, systems implementation, application support, or infrastructure support), and geography provides aggregate views of spend from a variety of perspectives.