Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Defining the interconnects

As such experiences show, a best of breed approach brings major implications for how outsourcing is managed – with the main issues often focusing less on the suppliers themselves than on the interconnects and possible gaps between them. Where a company is managing its own best of breed strategy, each supplier must support best practice not only in the service or function it provides, but also in the way it interacts with the others at various junction-points. This means that the ‘stove pipe’ of who is responsible for what has to be defined very clearly and explicitly to avoid grey areas, misunderstandings or uncertainties.

A classic example of this might occur where the corporate network is outsourced to one supplier ...