Strategic Sourcing: Top Five Tips to Optimize Your Use of Cloud, Managed, Hosted, and Professional Services

If you're like most organizations, you're feeling the pressure to outsource, whether to reduce costs, improve effectiveness, focus on strategic differentiators--or all three.

When you're assessing cloud or managed services providers, or looking to professional services organizations to augment your team, your challenges include:
* Assessing when to take the outsourcing plunge
* Selecting the right type of provider: Professional services, managed services, hosting, or cloud.
* How to craft a bullet-proof contract, including SLAs that protect your organization and guarantee you the services you've contracted for
* How to organize (or re-organize) your team to manage outsourced functions
* Success metrics: How to rate the success of your provider

This session will address these challenges, based on best practices distilled from Nemertes' years of bechmarking the sourcing practices of IT organizations. We'll provide you with a sound strategic framework and actionable recommendations to ensure your strategic sourcing initiative meets with measurable success.