Europe-Wide Outsourcing Trends Revealed: How Does the Netherlands Compare?
Nico Boot, EquaTerra’s Executive Director, Europe
This year’s EquaTerra European Service Provider Performance and Satisfaction Study has highlighted many Europe-wide and country-specific outsourcing trends. Overall the satisfaction with the service providers was quite good – 84 percent of all participating organisations are satisfied. Also, most respondents (73 per cent) said that the initial reasons for the decision to outsource were met.
There were two points where the results for the Dutch market are significantly different from the other regions. Interestingly, when organisations were asked to evaluate their outsourcing governance skills there is a noticeable difference in that Dutch CIOs are far more critical about the quality of their own outsourcing contract governance skills than their counterparts in Belgium, the Nordics and the UK – 65 percent indicated that their governance skills are ‘average’ or ‘weak’. By contrast, 67 percent of the UK organisations perceive their management skills as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. This is significant because EquaTerra client engagement and research has consistently found a direct correlation between outsourcing governance capabilities and outsourcing satisfaction and success levels, with poor capabilities resulting in low levels of satisfaction.
Another interesting Dutch-specific trend was that the Netherlands expects the biggest increases in offshoring Application Management (72 percent) and Infrastructure Management (60 percent) compared to other European countries. However, only 33 percent of the Dutch organisations are planning to offshore more End-User Management. This may be due to the greater impact of language and cultural requirements. This is fairly good news for the service providers that have their global delivery in good shape.
This year’s study investigated over 2000 outsourcing contracts held by over 750 of the top IT spending organisations in Europe. This included 460 Dutch outsourcing contracts held by over 150 leading organisations in the Netherlands. A copy of the management summary report can be viewed here.
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