Having explored security and reliability in your IT outsourcing arrangements – we turn the spotlight on the next critical dimension: scalability. There’s little point in outsourcing a fixed volume of work when demand may trend up or down significantly over the long-term, and even fluctuate tremendously in the short term.

“How big would you like it?” That’s how size and scale were typically addressed in the provision of IT solutions. So, what do you do when the answer to that question is “don’t know”…

It’s a vital factor for assuring the success of your IT investments over their planned life-time. After all, no ‘legacy’ system started off as one. When they were designed 10 or even 20 years ago quantum changes in technology or volume would not have been envisaged. And many applications are relied upon well beyond their expected life-cycle.

Whilst an outsourcer can certainly buffer these fluctuations on behalf of the client organisation, it’s important to understand the different aspects of scalability and how these can be best managed within an outsourcing agreement.

Defining scalability

Scalability is not only vertical i.e. about incorporating more users or transactions, but also horizontal i.e. the ability to increase scope, add more complex computations or in the case of infrastructure, an ability to handle different types of applications.

The cycle time of scalability is important – will changes happen within minutes, or over years, and does the solution need to scale down as well as up?

You can compare scalability to the problem of a city coping with commuter traffic. The problem here is congestion which will delay commuters from getting to and from work. So, scalability factors might include:

Number and type of vehicle: could you get better throughput by giving each commuter a motor scooter – so you have a greater volume of small vehicles?

Capacity of each vehicle: is a bus better than several cars?

Speed and prioritisation: are all commuters equally important? Do some require a dedicated line on the highway, or flashing-blue lights to clear the road?

Road capacity: will it help to have a bigger highway with more lanes to accommodate the traffic?

Phasing: given the inevitable cost of simply providing ‘more’ would it be better to spread the load over the day so that congestion is avoided?

In terms of outsourcing your IT solution, these aspects of scalability have directly analogous principles in the provision of those IT services. Do you really need more from your supplier, or can you as a client spread the load to keep demand within defined parameters.

What’s your scalability issue?

Because scalability in the IT solution will have a unique meaning in the context of your business it’s vital to get user engagement and agreement about what aspects of scalability are relevant and important to their desired outcomes.

Typically, we’d recommend early user engagement in the form of one or more workshops to identify future changes in scope and scale. These workshops should look at future requirements from a business point of view rather than technology.

By anchoring the scalability issues in a business context you ensure that the outsourcer will bring relevant solutions to enable ‘real world’ outcomes rather than being blinkered by a technical perspective upon what’s doable.

Therefore, during the selection process it will be important to evaluate the supplier’s understanding of your scalability requirements, and the methodology recommended by the supplier. There are new and emerging solutions to the scale challenge – including virtualisation, cloud computing and space based architecture. What’s important is the relevance and appropriateness of any given solution to your specific business needs.

So, you’ll want to ask your potential suppliers a couple of key questions about the solutions they propose: Can they demonstrate examples of how they have used scalable frameworks with other comparable clients? Can they share the commercial basis upon which scalability will be priced?

Because of the inherent variability required, scalability can be difficult to enshrine in a contract. It is not enough to say that the IT system will be scalable, but develop a number of scenarios in the contract to cover off the size and nature of the changes that are expected.

Such scenarios are not intended to be definitive, but act as a guide for the resolution and pricing of actual re-scaling as it happens.

Given that the best outsourcers will be able to offer quite significant capacity for dynamic scaling around your needs, you may also want to explore how your ‘excess capacity’ can be offered back to the market – resulting in a net reduction to your outsourced costs.

Finally, the need for scalability resulting from unforeseen changes can be enshrined by defining a governance process to be adopted by both parties when such matters arise.

Scalability is one important factor in keeping your outsourced IT solution future-proof, and the good news is that technology trends are providing an ever wider range of potential solutions.