Your outsourcing deals must be able to ramp up or down depending on your business needs at the time. William Benn explains how to do it.

Having explored security and reliability in your IT outsourcing arrangements, today I 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?’ Historically that’s how size and scale were addressed in the provision of IT services. So, what do you do when the answer to that question is: ‘I don’t know’?

Scalability is a vital factor for assuring the success of your IT investments over their planned lifetime. After all, no legacy system started off as one. When they were designed 10 or even 20 years ago, the quantum changes in technology or volume we have seen since then had not been envisaged. And many applications are relied upon well beyond their expected lifecycle.

While 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.

Define it

Scalability is not only vertical – incorporating more users or transactions – but also horizontal – increasing scope, adding more complex computations or in the case of infrastructure, handling different types of applications.

The cycle time of scalability is important. Will changes happen within minutes, or over years? And does the service need to scale down as well as up?

You can compare managing scalability of an IT service to motorway traffic, which has many variables – from number and capacity of vehicles, to road capacity and speed of traffic.

In terms of outsourcing your IT, you need to think about all the different aspects which could impact the scalability of your service, and ask questions such as: do you really need more from your supplier? Or can you, as a client, spread the load to keep demand within defined parameters?

Talk to users

Because the scalability of your IT 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 the outsourcer will bring relevant answers to enable real-world outcomes rather than being blinkered by a technical perspective of what’s doable.

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

You’ll want to ask your potential suppliers a couple of key questions about the services 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?

Cover all scenarios

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. You must 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 to act as a guide for the resolution and pricing of actual rescaling 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 product future-proof, and the good news is that technology trends are providing an ever-wider range of potential answers.