Innovation and flexibility become increasingly more important when renewing outsourcing contracts. Anyone ignoring this fact runs the risk of being left behind; established Frank de Vries and Arno IJmker. There are opportunities galore, when renewing existing contracts.
Over the last few years, ICT outsourcing was mainly used for saving costs. Recent research shows that cost reduction is still the main reason for having parts of ICT activities in an organization taken care of by an external supplier. However, in doing so organizations often overlook the fact that outsourcing also has to help innovate business processes and make ICT services more flexible. Anyone who does not include this in his considerations, will be stuck with an out-of-date outsourcing contract and runs the risk of being left behind. Since late 2005, the state of the economy has significantly improved. At this improvement of the economy, innovation and flexibility are these days high on the agenda. ICT providers respond to this with concepts such as 'on demand', 'mobile enterprise', 'agility' and marketing terms that all start from dynamics and adaptability in the provision of services. It is for example increasingly more easy as a customer to just pay for exactly what you use and outsourcing suppliers are able to absorb flexibly and very quickly large amounts of ICT activities. When renewing an existing outsourcing contract ideally a number of types of innovations take central stage (see box). When outsourcing it is the Demand Supply Organization that supports the business and ICT management on the one hand by mapping the needs from the operational management and on the other hand intelligently procuring and monitoring the corresponding ICT services and products as supplied by internal and external providers. At securing of innovation and flexibility this intermediary organization encounters a few problems. These problems can be divided into three categories, namely: incorrect governance from the Demand Supply Organization, hindrances in the current portfolio of contracts and lacking records of innovations and flexibility in the actual contractual agreements.
