IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

8.10. The role of External Service Providers (ESPs)

The role of ESPs under the new model would need to be very carefully managed for two fundamental reasons: (i) they adhere by definition to the traditional model and its contractual client–vendor relationship, and would therefore have to have very good reasons to deviate from it; (ii) like any business, they have a fundamentally different agenda to those of their clients, which is to get them to use as much of their services as possible, and not to improve the performance of their IT organizations (nothing wrong with this, after all, it's a business). Let's examine these two constraints in turn.

As a vendor in a client–vendor relationship, an ESP would normally only start work for a client with a signed-off SoR, and the resulting statement of work, or SoW, which stipulates in detail the actual tasks to be performed and the corresponding deliverables. Even for packaged software implementations, which are sometimes based on workshops which drive configuration decisions, there are still clearly defined tasks and deliverables which can ultimately be ticked off as corresponding or not 'to spec'. Finally, since the norm today is for clients to demand fixed-price contracts as opposed to time and materials (paradoxically not always the best way to do things, but that's beyond the scope of this book), there has to be a contract of some sort which specifies the criteria for final delivery and final payment. From the business perspective ...