Much to the envy of my fellow Naked Lawyers, last Friday I was fortunate to lunch at Claridges. Not solely, I might add, so I could sample the rather good food (asparagus, duck, chocolate parfait) but also because the IT industry trade association Intellect was holding one of its Industry Leadership lunches there. I was pleasantly surprised by the mix of multinational and much smaller suppliers that were represented, along with the usual raft of consultants and legal and financial advisors.
After lunch there was a talk by Guy Hains, President and CEO of the European Group for CSC who spoke about recent trends in IT outsourcing. I found the following points particularly interesting:
- the feeling that the industry should put together some kind of guidance or code dealing with the transfer of outsourcing deals from one supplier to another (eg at the end of the first supplier’s term). This is an area fraught with difficulty, not least because contractually the purchaser and original supplier are usually stuck with whatever they agreed at the outset of the project, at a time when (generally) they are friends and the end of the relationship seems too far off to worry about. I am sure some industry consensus on how to manage the handover from the outgoing to incoming supplier would not go amiss.
- the indication that purchasers are becoming more concerned about green issues including the environmental impact of their IT kit. Guy’s view was that suppliers need to be addressing this and seeking to drive down the costs of greener solutions, or risk being left behind. Certainly the introduction of the WEEE directive and other environmental protection legislation means that both purchasers and suppliers have an interest in reducing the negative environmental effects of their IT – but of course purchasers will not want to pay more for this in the long run.
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