The transition of IT services is an integral part of IT outsourcing. The transition aims to transfer the contracted services to the new supplier. After the transition, the new supplier should have taken over the IT services in such a way that it can provide the correct services on time, in accordance with specifications and at the agreed upon cost.

“Traditionally, IT is seen as a cost of doing business with a very limited link from IT activities to business outcomes. In order to prove the link and therefore the value, we need to use performance indicators (often referred to as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) as measure and proof for both the link and the added value. In this article, IT includes the IT assets and the application and infrastructure management activities to build, maintain and provide IT functions to end users.”

In the past decade all major IT service providers—as well as most midsized and some small players—have invested significantly in offshore delivery capacity, most notably in India. Globalization in general and offshore outsourcing specifically have matured and even though the economic downturn has slowed discretionary spending and investments, the offshore outsourcing business is still growing.

The IT organization is required to be customer-oriented and at the same time flexible and efficient as well as being able to deliver new systems quickly and at low cost. These new systems have to be implemented trouble-free within a stable infrastructure. In fact rather a lot to ask from one single organization. In a relatively immature environment where the customer’s wishes and the available technology are constantly changing, everything is becoming increasingly more complex.

The internal IT organization that cannot meet the information demands of the business runs the risk of becoming marginalized and losing its right to exist. What can the CIO or IT manager possibly do to win back the confidence of the business and to (re)position his organization as a preferred partner for innovation?

This article describes a new approach for (ITIL) process implementations, which has already resulted in measurable and often surprising improvement of IT performance in practice. You can read how from simple data that is available within every IT organization (or that can be made available quite easily), you can explain and pronounce the value of IT to the customer.

Legislative compliance and the continuous rat race for higher quality and lower cost are some of the topics that keep the average IT manager from having a nine-to-five working day. And this despite the availability of a multitude of models, approaches and best practices claiming to be the golden egg your IT organization has been looking for all this time. And now there is the well-known ISO-goose claiming they have laid another egg: ISO/IEC20000.

Fueled by business changes and changes in IT, application portfolios have become increasingly heterogeneous. A growing demand from the business and a decrease of supply in the IT labor market pose new challenges to the CIO. Now that external sourcing options for application services are maturing, a growing number of organizations take a more structured approach to application sourcing.

In May 2007 the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) released the new version of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). At the same time the APMG Group took over custodianship (certifying professionals and accrediting training organizations) from the Exam Institute (EXIN) and the Information Systems Examinations Board (ISEB) and the certification scheme changed completely. Now, in January 2008, after delivering the first ITIL® v3 Foundation trainings and after studying the materials, it is time to make up the balance. After 6 months we are beginning to get a better idea of this new version. Although the material probably constitutes a revolution in thinking, the question is whether it will revolutionize the market. In this white paper we will take a look at what is new, what is exiting, what is disappointing and how we can use this new version to our advantage?

Can the newly released Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) v3 processes, well implemented and managed, significantly improve the probability of achieving success in an Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) effort? To address the above question or hypothesis a brief review/level set of the evolution of IT processes, specifically ITIL®, is presented along with a comparable review of ITO processes.