From the Editor-in-Chief: Source Agnostic

The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third-party IT providers to fill in the talent, deadline, and budgetary gaps that now exist.

The four mega trends in enterprise IT this year are Cloud, Analytics, Mobility, and Enterprise Social Media. The CIO State of the Enterprise 2013 study validates this. But, you don’t need to commission a survey to discover this. What our research also reveals, interestingly, is that these trends are leading to a surge in a fifth—Sourcing. There is currently an acute skillset gap within IT departments regarding the very same technologies mentioned above. A gap so fundamental that it dooms the best of intentions that an organization might have for these technologies As near-term business horizons shrunk, multiple projects, fast rollouts, fewer people and increasing change requests from business have stressed the delivery capabilities of IT teams. Yet you have annually delivered on average three-and-a-half times the number of projects than in the pre-slump era. The other reality is that IT teams bled talent in the five to 15 year experience range between 2009 and 2011. Talent, which in many cases hasn’t been replaced. Not directly, in any case. So the equation works out to delivering more and more projects in shorter and shorter timelines with fewer and fewer people in technology domains that internal teams do not understand well. How does a CIO stay true to the promise to business of scale, of speed, of responsiveness? The answer lies in breaching the perimeter. It lies in a greater reliance on third-party IT than ever before. It means not being a fanatic about where you source IT from—traditional outsourcing, consult, managed services, the public cloud, body shops—as long as you respond to the business ask. The days of “my IT team knows best” are fast coming to a close, as enterprises look to third-party IT providers to fill in the talent, deadline, and budgetary gaps that now exist. This is going to be as much about gaining new capabilities, improving organizational focus and delivery speed, as it will be about reigning in operational cost. With efficiencies and effectiveness both coming into play, Indian organizations will get more agnostic about how they source and deliver their IT. What do you think?