Concentration on the core business, buying in of external know-how – this is the outsourcing mantra which has been repeated for many years by the providers of IT services to their major customers. Quite new, however, is the fact that this credo meets with a lot of enthusiam by small and medium-sized companies, as is reported in an article by the Austrian magazine Format. For smaller companies it was important to relieve their IT departments of daily routines and to avoid constant employee trainings, but not to outsource entire units (also see “Outsourcing of IT services pays off to small and medium-sized companies”).
The authors of the article recommend small and medium-sized companies to think about outsourcing (⇒ Wikipedia) in the case where the acquisition of a new telecomunication system is planned. Due to the ongoing integration of PC and telephone, there is a potential of rationalisation and, on the other hand, those integrated systems get increasingly complex at the same time. Both these aspects can be combined by the concept of Managed Services (⇒ English Wikipedia) which is a particularly frequent version of selective outsourcing suitable for the optimization of business processes.
Another advantage of selective outsourcing is a reduced running period of the outsourcing contract: „As a rule, a selective outsourcing contract is signed for a period of two or three years.” Longer periods are common only in combination with more favourable conditions. 