Offshoring as a Service

Managed services is the practice of transferring day-to-day related management responsibility as a strategic method for improved effective and efficient operations. The person or organization who owns or has direct oversight of the organization or system being managed is referred to as the offerer, client, or customer. The person or organization that accepts and provides the managed service is regarded as the service provider.

Typically, the offerer remains accountable for the functionality and performance of managed service and does not relinquish the overall management responsibility of the organization or system.

Consider having non-core application support & maintenance being offshored to the vendor as managed services.  Application Service Provider (ASP) is is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network. Software offered using an ASP model is also sometimes called On-demand software or software as a service (SaaS).

Some points to take into consideration:
- Re-use resources that have built customer capability in the offshoring development center ODC.
- Have the vendor resources onsite time-to-time to minimize enployee turnover.
- Have an infrastructure that makes this service possible.
- The price model can vary from fixed monthly rate to time & material model as well as price per desktop, server or network device. Important to use the correct model depending the type of managed service to be used.
- Important for the customer to be a good orderer. Besides support & maintenance activities, it is important to take into consideration proactive activities that also need to be  performed.
- Follow up of SLA’s & KPI’s are important. If there is a requiremet for 99,96% uptime it is vital that this has be fullfilled.
- Make sure that the process is in place that defines the roles & responsibilities.
- Make also sure that the Master Service Agreement covers the terms & conditions.

There are a number of advantages such as
- Redeploying IT staff and tools to focus on strategic technology projects that impact the enterprise’s bottom line
- Access to product and technology experts dedicated to available products
- A provider’s service level agreement guarantees a certain level of service

Disadvantages are
- Loss of control: resource & knowlegde will be build up at the vendor.
- Loss of control of corporate data
But since non-core services are managed by vendor it should not be a problem.

So look at each assignment and instead of resource augmentation maybe this can be packaged as managed service?