Leading companies hire IT sourcing consultants to plug IT capability gaps quickly and cost-effectively. By bringing extensive experience in helping companies build up their IT toolkits, they help companies become more competitive and respond better to shifting market dynamics. Hiring an IT sourcing consultant also helps a company filter through thousands of possible options, carefully weighing the pros and cons of each option. As a result, working with an IT sourcing consultant helps a company make the right tradeoffs in terms of cost, capability, and scalability when procuring IT resources.

Moreover, IT sourcing specialists offer crucial insights and support in the following areas:

Solution Analysis and Review

With so many solutions available on the market today, IT sourcing consultants help companies rationalize options and create standardized approaches to solutions. They help a company define its technology needs and create a framework by which to map possible solutions to requirements. Working closely with internal IT teams, they also request and review solution demos to understand how each solution meets the company’s needs. Having analyzed and reviewed various solutions exhaustively, they recommend the best-in-class solution that the company should purchase.

Business Process Continuity

IT sourcing consultants ensure business process continuity by finding solutions that “play well” with current IT resources. To this end, they recommend solutions built using similar or compatible technology stacks, establish possible third-party connector services or identify those with backward/forward compatibility. Companies that hire IT sourcing consultants avoid costly mistakes associated with sourcing IT resources that slow down performance, have long development or integration cycles, or that need extensive infrastructure changes that might impact other processes.

Cost Control Measures

IT sourcing specialists help companies understand the direct and indirect costs of IT sourcing. Since, in most cases, the actual price of technology is quite low, they help extrapolate these costs in terms of development and deployment lead times, workforce upskilling requirements, and possible additional infrastructure costs. Companies that work with IT sourcing consultants get better cost visibility of their IT resources and can plan better based on performance and cost forecasts.

Policy Formulation

IT sourcing specialists help companies formulate IT sourcing policies that provide a sustainable framework for future growth. One such policy is a migration to Everything-as-a-Service commercial models. By creating a well-defined E-a-a-S policy, the IT sourcing consultant helps a company seek outcome-driven agreements with vendors in partnerships that drive innovation and attain targeted outcomes. IT sourcing consultants also help companies formulate policies that scale up and scale down IT resources in a dynamic and modern approach to IT sourcing.