Companies are looking for an IT service provider who has the ability to provide skills and processes that are not available within the company. Hence it is important to look at a few factors in order to evaluate IT services providers in order to make an informed decision.
Skills And Experience
Any IT services provider should have skills that are much beyond the basic operating system maintenance. Hence there have to be skill levels that are related to managing change and virtualization. Next will be skills related to high availability databases besides multiple network technologies, as well as cross platform integration, and cloud technologies.
You need to look beyond the basic certifications as well as headcount. There has to be scalability as well as availability of staff having specialised skill sets. Next, the specialists must be organised and able to share knowledge in order to communicate best practices. In the same way, an IT services provider must have expertise across all delivery models, including managed services and cloud, along with IT and strategic outsourcing. This will help in achieving an integrated multi-sourcing that can be structured to meet your specific needs.
Proactive Approach
The IT services provider must have a proactive approach that will emphasise problem prevention and look for continuous improvement. This is more than simple monitoring or device management. It would require employing of sophisticated technologies in order to drive incident prevention that can be done by analysing failure patterns across various platforms and processes. The IT service provider must be able to provide visibility into areas for customer improvement. They must employ sophisticated back-end technology that would include automation across various managed services. These would include capabilities like sophisticated alert mechanisms, in addition to automated workload categorization as well as prioritisation. Automation is required in order to reduce human intervention and to improve quality as well as productivity of the company.
Alignment with industry best practices
This is required in order to achieve a reliable IT infrastructure to optimise IT management. Hence industry best practices must be used in order to manage IT resources. These would encompass problem, incident, as well as event, configuration, inventory, and performance management besides reporting. This would require consistent processes besides knowledge management as well as consolidated service visibility. After all, consistent service delivery will always be built on consistent processes that are clearly spelt out and employ a methodology that is scalable. In the same way, policy and process documentation must be able to replicate itself across multiple delivery centres. There must be a knowledge management system is accessible to staff from any location. Here they would be able to access prior problems and attain resolution information. There must be means to gain visibility into the health of infrastructure along with the performance of managed services. There must be a secure web portal that is able to consolidate related services into a single dashboard by providing access to real-time service visibility.
