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Top 5 IT Outsourcing Trends in Canada in 2016

Posted By marketinggarage / December 23, 2015 / , / 1 Comment

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Leverage the expertise of R3P to take advantage of emerging trends in IT

The IT outsourcing landscape is starting to take shape for 2016, and there are a number of emerging trends that will impact how organizations will approach and best utilize IT outsourcing as part of their growth strategy:

 

  1. The Shift to and Impact of Mobile

Mobile computing is forcing companies to rethink how they use technology to run their businesses and address the needs of their customers. We are now at the point where people are spending more time on mobile than their desktops. Users now spend 51% of their time online using mobile versus 42% on desktop, a significant change in internet user habits that needs to be addressed. A change in customer usage habits is also changing customer expectations in terms of access, responsiveness, and mobile capabilities.IT Consulting Mobile Trends

Mobile banking is a great example of the impact of mobile. Banks are increasingly offering mobile banking services and apps to meet their customers’ increasing demand for mobile banking solutions. 31% of Canadians reported using mobile banking in 2015, up 5% from 2010, and 43% expect to conduct their banking on a mobile device in the future.

Mobile IMPACT: Customers increasing expectations require a re-calibration of outsourcing SLAs (such as: UI responsiveness, peak capacity, redundancy) and a review of the infrastructure stack to determine if it supports a mobile-first approach to quickly deploying new functionality to customers.

 

  1. Time for Consolidation

Consolidation within an industry is a clear sign of its maturity, and there is an increasing trend toward consolidation of IT infrastructure, operations and business services. Large enterprises are consolidating business units, office functions, and geographic locations and are looking to centralized shared service centre solutions to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve the overall quality of service being offered to their customers.

Centralization enables standardization, common measur
ement and continuous improvement and makes organizations more agile.  New business functionality can be deployed quickly once to the centralized shared service, rather than the time consuming process of many deployments in a distributed / decentralized model.  The challenge is to figure out how to most effectively consolidate to remove duplicative costs, and create economies of scale while providing the same or better service.  Do regional or global central operations make sense? Does in-house or third party solution make the most sense?

Consolidation IMPACT: Enables agility, and simplifies operations, SLAs, governance and reduces costs. However, it requires greater relationship management with the internal entities that no longer have direct control.

 

  1. Hybrid Cloud Computing

Finding the right balance between private and public cloud solutions is something that companies will wrestle with in 2016. Assessing and exploring their options for making the shift away from traditional data centres to more open and flexible technology infrastructure will play a big role in IT outsourcing in the coming year.

IT Consulting Cloud Computing

According to a recent PwC study, of those that outsource IT to a third party, 31% use private cloud managed internally, 41% use private cloud managed by a service provider, and 22% use public cloud, with 20% of organizations not currently having a cloud strategy. Based on this data, it’s clear that most company IT strategies in 2016 will be a hybrid of private and public cloud to address concerns about data security, data and system integration, IT governance and system portability.

Hybrid IMPACT: Outsourcing arrangements need to be updated to provide enterprises with the flexibility of 2-speeds: (1) near instant access to standard business capabilities via public cloud; and (2) regular access to more secure and/or customized private cloud.

 

  1. Data Centre Sprawl Leads to Consolidation

Data centres are one of the few industrial electrical uses that are on the rise.  Today, they make up 4% of the world’s energy consumption. Ideally large enterprises would like 2 to 3 Data centers.  However, geographic proximity to the various businesses, decentralized budgets/decisions, and ongoing acquisitions, are a few of the key reasons for data centre sprawl. In many cases, 20-80 data centres exist for a single global enterprise. The more data centers equates to higher risk, higher costs and higher decentralization.  However, expect 2016 to be the year for companies to start exploring new ways to change energy use to reduce their carbon footprint. Expect companies to adopt data centre and IT management best practices to lower energy use, a move that will also provide an economic cost cutting benefit.

DC IMPACT:  Outsourcing contract renewals need to include a data center consolidation strategy and plan to simplify, standardize, reduce risk and eliminate duplicative costs.

 

  1. Rising Customer Expectations Online

Canadians are among the biggest internet users in the world. They visit more websites and spend more time online than anyone else in the world. According to Huffington Post, Canadians visit an average of 80 websites and spend 36.3 hours per month online. These are very reflective of customers’ increasing expectations to access websites, meaning companies can’t afford down time or they risk losing business.

Customer Expectation IMPACT: The rising expectations mean that IT outsourcing agreements must commit to reduced service outages and improve real-time response to effectively serve your customer base.

 

 

At R3P Consulting, our thought leadership approach leads to IT outsourcing solutions and managed IT services that save money, reduce risk, and improve service. Contact us for a diagnostic assessment and to discuss how to get the most out of your IT providers.

 

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