The success of an application management project depends ultimately on how well people are incorporated in change processes. T-Systems expert Armin Weigand writes on this subject in Swiss IT Magazine.

When businesses decide to outsource their application management to an external service provider, their main aim is to cut costs and become more flexible. To that end they slim down and modernise their IT systems or reorganise their service processes, enabling them to make savings of up to 50 per cent.

Change management for outsourcing

But outsourcing succeeds not only because IT systems suddenly run at different locations. The decisive success factor is the people who operate the solutions. After all, they integrate their know-how seamlessly into the changed application management processes across time, culture and language boundaries. Businesses’ change management needs to be sustained in order to be effective: employees must first understand and then live through new structures and processes in order to work successfully over the long term. It is the job of transition and service managers to guide them to that objective. During the outsourcing they support change processes in the business and build a bridge between the cultures of the client and of the future service provider. Only then can application management fulfil its objective and contribute to cost savings.

You can read more about this in Swiss IT Magazine.

The author Armin Weigand is responsible for the areas of Application Management & Modernisation, Transformational Outsourcing and Systems Landscape Optimisation at T-Systems in Switzerland.