As businesses stabilize and expand IT budgets, IT outsourcing is on the rise, particularly in help desk support.
The percentage of the IT budget designated for outsourcing services is up 23 percent, on average, in 2012 over the prior year, according to Computer Economics annual outsourcing study, IT Outsourcing Statistics 2012/2013. The report also found Web/e-commerce systems and application development were the two most widely outsourced functions, and outsourcing in that sector is a mature service with a high adoption level, likely to grow relatively slowly, compared with other services.
Help desk and desktop support are the IT functions with the greatest potential for successfully reducing costs through outsourcing, while the functions with the greatest potential for improving service are desktop support and IT security. The study profiled outsourcing activity for 11 IT functions, including application development, application hosting, application maintenance, data center operations, database administration, desktop support, disaster recovery services, help desk services, IT security, network operations, and Web/e-commerce systems.
For each IT function, the company looks at how many organizations are outsourcing work and how much of their workload is being outsourced. “As our analysis shows, IT organizations are beginning to embrace cloud-based applications as well as expand outsourcing of data center operations. Other factors are also supporting decisions to outsource IT functions, including the ever-present desire to reduce costs,” the report said.
