By Kailash Attal, Chief Quality Officer, Global Head – Services and Solutions
Company executives like to maintain control of IT system activities by keeping them
in-house, where they are "all visible, all the time." I can understand this feeling
because, as I revealed in my last post, I've always wanted to know about everything
that goes on around me, how it all works.
But as I also noted, this visibility and control comes at a steep price: the rising
Total Cost of Ownership. Why? The traditional mission of IT has been to keep an
organization's systems "up and running." As IT systems grew, added more services and
became more complex, the IT department simply hired more staff to meet the
increasing demand. And so TCO was destined to keep on growing.
And that's just part of the picture. Ironically, by maintaining control and
responsibility for your IT systems in-house, without mature or even basic
Knowledge Management practices, you could be placing critical company knowledge
at risk. When the company’s knowledge base is retained only by a select few
individuals, that crucial expertise could walk out the door at any minute
when a member of the team leaves the organization.
Despite this very real risk, there has not been much investment in the Knowledge
Management of applications. Instead, organizations have had to improvise
a continual process of knowledge transfer as staff members come and go.
Unfortunately, the sense of security company leaders got by keeping management
of their IT systems in-house was merely an illusion, easily shattered when
the costs got too high. And those costs included valuable company knowledge.
We know better now, not only that knowledge can and should be retained but
that it can be kept completely up to date and accessible. Outcome-based
Managed Services can be a successful catalyst to address Knowledge Management
gaps and other issues through the institutionalization of standard processes
and the use of knowledge mining tools.
In short, critical company knowledge, rather than residing solely with a
limited number of individuals, can be properly captured, actively managed
and accessed, and easily retained -- before it can walk out the door.
