Difficulties of the state and IT outsourcing contact

The changeable progress of IT outsourcing in public sector is caused by two important interdependent factors, first of which is demand for outsourcing in principle. Organizations transferring these or those non-core activities to the specialized companies are aimed at high economic efficiency — operating costs reduction, processes optimization. Besides, they want to introduce modern working technologies. This approach is not characteristic for public institutions by nature since their task is the opposite activity — in fact budgetary funds development, and opportunities opening for economy, in particular in the middle of the year is undesirable.

Another outsourcing difficulty for government authorities concerning sharply the IT sphere is one-year system of the budget planning. Contracts for services rendering are concluded for one year only, and the probability of the outsourcing company change affects negatively the general quality of the rendered services. Long-term IT projects assume labor-consuming, capital-intensive and, the main thing, knowledge-intensive work at the introduction stage Therefore the possible leaving from the project the next year compels the IT companies to solve the existing problems not in a complex, but on the single and within the short-term perspective in order not to transfer the full-functioning system to competitors in case of a sudden advantage in the services rendering competition by other company. For the solution of similar problems, for example, in Moscow transition to three years' planning is carried out.

One more problematic issue of IT outsourcing for the state is the existence of the service cost priority over the project economic efficiency of and quality. Besides, in the most part of competitions the reputation of the performing company is not considered while the applications assessment that, on the one hand, in a certain degree equalizes chances of new and old functioning players, and on the other — provides the action field to the unfair companies, then not capable to render the services declared in the competitive documentation in a due measure or to render them qualitatively.

Thus, in general it is possible to call the state the "overdue" client in IT services field. However this phenomenon has three positive consequences at once: as for IT companies this market will be non-saturated in the long term, and the state is able to avoid the mistakes made during products testing and primary introduction earlier and also to receive services at a lower price due to lack of "innovation" in a certain degree.

Anyway, the state is among the most important clients of IT sector, and information technologies introduction is the obligatory factor of the state system development, in this connection both are necessary to be adjust and become more flexible. It is interesting to mark that information technologies exactly can really help slow state machine to become more flexible.