Building the Relationship…
Came across an article in the Times Online about the “Threat of Tangle with Outsourced IT“. It’s a short article and a bit lightweight for the complex corporate world it refers to, but one of the quoted comments is worth looking at.
David Bickerton is chief information officer for British Gas and he says in the article: “The investment is around having the right people and capabilities internally to develop the relationships and provide the kind of integration you need” and this just about sums it up from our side of the fence as well.
At Waverley Lane we ask that our clients nominate a single point of contact to work with us. That person doesn’t need to be especially technical – it’s more to act as a conduit for our client to raise issues with us and for us to work with either on immediate issues or, especially, on the bigger picture for the longer term.
Yes, of course we make allowances for people being on holiday and for emergencies when the contact person can’t be found, but the real point is that outsourcing your IT shouldn’t be a “pay the bill and forget about it” matter. As the provider of outsourced IT services we need to be gently managed by our client and a dialogue needs to take place; that is the way in which a trusting and productive working relationship gets to be built up over time.