What pointers can you give to mitigate outsourcing risks?
Risk mitigation begins before a contract is signed.
Few organizations enter into outsourcing arrangements with meaningful insight into their own service delivery metrics or the business impact of their services prior to outsourcing. As such, when drafting service-level agreements, service providers and their customers must establish meaningful and realistic performance metrics. Managers must have tools for continuously monitoring service delivery, ideally tools that provide proactive alerts when services are trending out of compliance. Such tools provide time for resolving problems before contract terms are broken.
This was first published in March 2006