The very nature of the mid-market organisations that are too big to be considered SME’s, but smaller than large, exchange-listed businesses – dictates that they are likely to be going through some kind of development or business event. They could be preparing for an IPO, in the process of selling to a private equity house, or growing through acquisition or organically, for example. Often what they are looking for from an outsourcing service is agility.
This is not always easy from an IT perspective. Existing internal IT delivery and support functions may not be suitably developed or appropriate to meet the needs while outsourced IT service vendors with mature service delivery model often base this on a specific set of technologies. What if the mid-market company finds this too restrictive? Flexibility is crucial. These organisations are often in transition and they need a wide range of services to support them at whatever stage they have reached. They don’t want to be dictated to and they may still want to manage aspects of their business IT themselves, so providers have to listen first, be adaptable and deliver according to each company’s individual needs.
It’s worth remembering that there are less than 28,000 mid-market organisations in the UK, but they are responsible for a third of our economic output. Perhaps this explains why they demand maturity and agility at the same time; they are on an upward trajectory and we will benefit by keeping up.
Often the first external service that a mid-market organisation can benefit from is some strategic IT guidance – a virtual CIO perhaps– and the job is to assess and make recommendations for their IT footprint including the overall infrastructure, hardware and software. Business transition means that they may have an IT Manager, but no one with strategic business and IT skills. Alternatively they may have some urgent problems to fix which requires outside assistance but need specialist IT Services procurement assistance to find the best source or have an immediate need to realise savings from consolidating disparate IT functions.
These specific examples are in addition to standard services, including core service desk and service call handling, plus change, problem, asset, vendor/supplier and security management.
What characterises these companies, however, is not necessarily the services they need, because their requirements are so variable, but the fact that they have so little time to achieve their corporate goals. They are driven by specific targets – whether it’s to make an acquisition or to get to an IPO – so from an IT perspective they can’t move fast enough. Our job at ITSS is to help them get there
