Governance Framework for IT Transformation Projects in Outsourcing

In the IT Outsourcing industry, a complex transition and transformation process is required for on-boarding large enterprise customers. The process begins after the customer signs a contract, and ends when steady-state operation is attained by the service provider. Large outsourcing deals may last several years, involve several hundred million dollars, and are traditionally highly customized. In this paper, we provide recommendations for a governance framework that can manage the on-boarding stage of large, customized deals. There are no existing governance frameworks that work well from the perspective of the service provider, at the scale and diversity observed in these deals. The framework must standardize a set of processes to direct, control, and measure on-boarding activities and enable a governance organization to create and maintain a single data, process and program management instance for each customer. It must also maintain a well-defined and comprehensive view of the key entities in the transition and transformation process, and their relationships. These entities may include projects, people, roles and responsibilities, process metrics, services, and the multiple internal and partner organizations and their operational level agreements (OLAs). Finally, the framework must improve repeatability across service deals, enforce adoption of best practices that are distilled from historical deals, and better avoid known problems and issues.