Backing off Support

[giles]

I have heard that ITIL encourage the backing off of support to thrid party suppliers - if the service is not offered in house - does anyone know if this is true? If so, does anyone know where I might find a statement which supports this?

[mcardinal]

I am not sure that the ITIL books state it quite that way...

My firm's work in SLM and my own understanding has led me to agree that an organization should focus on its core services. Anything else is probably best left to other experts and covered by OLAs or Underpinning Contracts.

An example: I work for a large midwest insurance firm. Our testing organization used to send out monthly communications as part of their service. We have a dedicated internal communications area as well. While doing internal consulting to design the testing services, I asked if they were testing or communications specialists. They said testing. I then asked why they were doing communications and not letting our internal comm people handle that through an OLA. They quickly got the picture and stopped doing their own communications, and just provided content to the comm group to distribute.

If your specialty is not support, find out who does it best (internal or third party). Subscribe to that service and maintain it through a service agreement. Think of this as "smartsourcing" rather than "outsourcing".

Hope this helps.