As enterprises ramp up their digital transformation initiatives, the strategic sourcing function faces the challenging task of establishing and orchestrating an IT services vendor portfolio that can help these companies fulfill their business objectives. This digital age sourcing model requires the co-existence of distinct IT service provider roles to help enterprises balance multiple competing objectives such as risk management, modernization, and building capabilities across change, manage, and run initiatives. The underlying principle of this framework is that deriving business value from IT requires enterprises to have access to best-of-breed capabilities across a wide range of skills. As part of this shift, organizations need to consider the specialist ecosystem.
In this viewpoint, we explain why specialists are important and how an increasing number of enterprises have begun to recognize the need for technological, functional/methodological, and industrial expertise to add value to business and technology transformation initiatives. We also cover the challenges associated with specialists that enterprises need to be aware of and provide a checklist of key metrics for evaluating and identifying the right specialists.
