Netsourcing: Renting Business Applications and Services Over a Network

Chapter 7. Mitigating and Managing Risks in Netsourcing Deals

Risks in the eyes of customers are those issues that could adversely affect their company and/or operations as a direct result of having entered into a netsourcing deal. From the outset, netsourcing ventures bear a set of risks that need careful assessment and mitigation to avoid surprises. In practice, our experiences from investigating all uses of the IT services market demonstrate unfailingly that a customer cannot step aside from an IT outsourcing/netsourcing arrangement and merely monitor and reward or punish outcomes. Risk management enables problems to be anticipated and mitigated and as such should be a critical ongoing activity across the lifetime of any netsourcing deal.