You can see it now – a voice says “we need to review the IT Risk Register” and everyone suddenly has a more pressing meeting to go to. Perhaps the reason for this reluctance to review the register is born from the fact that it typically contains many items around technology and the need to invest in technology and infrastructure. Whilst it is important to acknowledge the significance of this, equal weight must be given to managing the risks relating to an outsource service.

Are you receiving the full benefit from your outsourcing arrangements?

Did you sufficiently revise your IT's organisational structure when you outsourced some IT services?

Many organisations in both the public and private sectors are not gaining all the benefits that they could from their outsourcing initiatives. This is because they have not sufficiently modified the structure of their in-house (retained) IT organisation to optimise their operations in an outsourced environment.

All too often in our work as sourcing advisors, we come across disappointing sourcing relationships with ‘SLAs at Green’ but ‘Relationship at Red’. We will probably hear comments along the lines of "I guess the service is more or less OK, but where is all that innovation and added value we expected?"

So how can you avoid this depressing situation and end up instead with an exemplary sourcing partnership which is widely recognised internally and externally as delivering significant business benefit?

It is both a tough and exciting time for retail companies. Whether it is just more evolution in a market sector that has had to constantly evolve to survive, or approaching revolution is open to conjecture. What is clear, however, is that the way retail engages with its customers has radically changed in recent years.

We are frequently told that High Street retail traffic has fallen and that the fall is dramatic. It seems that bodies in stores do not directly link to High Street sales; yet consumers are still spending, so retailers are ‘uber’ busy ensuring that they are active across all retail channels in order to capture as much of this consumer traffic as possible.