How IT Leaders Can Outsource Their Way To Business Success
A vice president of IT says you must work with solution providers as if they were an extension of your internal team.
Kicking off the Midsize Enterprise Summit Fall 2024 in Tampa, Fla., was a discussion on how outsourcing some critical IT operations and working closely with solution providers can help IT departments find success.
The discussion was led by Chance Irvine, vice president of information technology at Transit Technologies, a Greater Sum Ventures company.
Irvine praised the solution providers that helped him drive business. These providers shared the stage with him during his presentation. They included Chris Collins, senior manager at LBMC Cybersecurity; Jason Wright, CEO of Avatar Managed Services; Bob Schubert, founder and CEO of TechTrust ; Andrew Ramirez, founder and CEO of 3Hue; and Amanda Soos, senior manager at Rackspace.
“Looking at IT, we always look at it as a cost center,” Irvine said. He added that it is important for IT leaders to consider not only how to change that perspective, but to ask themselves, “How do we become more impactful to the business’ growth?”
Irvine said that outsourcing helped his company not only deal with too much staff turnover, but also helped as it scaled through acquisitions.
He spoke about the solution providers that shared the stage with him. “These folks represent the majority of my team. It’s all outsourced.”
Irvine offered several useful nuggets of advice when outsourcing and working with partner companies:
- Whether hiring people internally or bringing in an outside party, you have to give the outside party direction just as you would internal staff.
- Bring in the right folks that you need for the challenges at hand. Irvine said one of his biggest challenges was that the company wanted to achieve its SOC 2 security certification in six months.
- A good solution provider partner can help you “understand” and “identify the gaps,” he said. He said it’s important to get an audit from them. “[The solution provider] has got to work with me ... they’ve got to be on board,” he said.
- A partnering third party needs to be strategic. “I can’t have order takers,” Irvine said. “I need feedback. I can’t just have [the partner] take this and run without having that dialogue. They’ve got to be engaged.”
- Your solution provider needs to be cross-functional and “not just with me, but with my business,” Irvine advised.
- A partner has to be able to speak with other members and departments within the business. “They’ve got to be just as invested, as existent as my team,” he said.
- Partners should help you set a better strategic direction. They have to “start making an impact ... so the business can see how those things that we are doing are accelerating business development,” Irvine said.
The solution providers also weighed in on how they help Transit Tech and its customers, overall.
“We really aim to be a true business partner ... we strive to help our clients achieve compliance and navigate through complex business challenges,” said Collins from LMBC.
Ramirez said that 3Hue helped prepare Transit for compliance and also helped with creating an “overall mutual information security program.”
For customers, Ramirez said, “We make sure that we do a complete threat analysis. We’re not like other virtual CISO providers ... [there] is team engagement across different service requirements.”
Soos said that Rackspace “is large enough to scale, expert enough to deliver, but still small enough to care.”
“Transit Tech had multiple accounts across [hyperscalers] with really no unified view. We consolidated those into a single view, streamlining management and providing 24/7 cloud platform expertise,” she said.
Wright from Avatar said, “We’re the ones that bridge that gap between so many of these other vendors when it comes to a support standpoint,” He said that with customers Avatar aims to find out “what can we do to optimize the environment?” To do that, he said his company will “write down the number of issues, increase productivity and eliminate downtime.”
“From there we can move from the reactive side of engagement to the proactive side,” Wright added.
“I’m getting ahead because of these folks,” Irvine said about the solution providers. “You’re still going to have to do [several] things ... coaching, all of these steps to on-board [partners] as an extension of your team. You start making movement on these, you are no longer just a cost center to the business, you’re driving things,” he added.