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

Internal SLAs: a step in the right direction

Alongside these people issues, moving to an outsourcing model involves more than a change in the way a service is delivered. For the client, it involves a shift towards a more industrialized set of conventions – with wide-ranging implications for both culture and operational processes.

Where companies have created internal service levels and shared service ‘factories’, this has enabled them to codify activities more clearly. In doing so they have tackled difficulties very similar to those they would encounter in trying to outsource an activity without the benefit of existing SLAs to use as benchmarks. The difference is that with outsourcing the pain is inflicted by a third party, as opposed to being ...