Many organizations today are looking to find ways to more efficiently manage the IT rat race. This “rat race” is the never-ending task of trying to keep up with technology innovations, government regulations, security risks, spammers, hackers, you name it. What is the best software for my organization? Which hardware should I buy? What’s the best antivirus software? How can I keep my data secure? Most importantly, am I paying too much for all of this?
“Stop the (IT) world I want to get off!” This exclamation has probably summed up most executives’ response to this dilemma at one point or another—including some IT executives.
There is no simple answer to this dilemma, but there are organizations which are trying to address this by collaborating to share resources and experiences. But how do you do that? How do you trust your competitors to work with you? How can you begin to share ideas and experiences in a useful manner?
The cost of maintaining an Information System can be quite expensive and difficult to manage. In today’s IT environment, organizations must constantly keep up with current technologies, both to stay compliant with ever-increasing government regulations like HIPAA and to stay competitive in the marketplace. These systems require 24-hour attention by highly trained staff, for a variety of reasons. Most organizations are concerned with security risks, as well as the need to have constant access to the systems, because technology is now a critical component of a business.
A group in the Chicago area is successfully doing some of these very things; they are collaborating. ProviNET Solutions is an IT Solutions company that began as the outsourced IT department for Providence Life Services. They had a need to serve their own organization’s IT needs and began to meet these needs collectively. Over time other organizations partnered or merged their resources with ProviNET Solutions. All organizations who share these resources benefit from this collaboration because individually they cannot afford the level of expertise that they receive, but collectively they can. They are therefore able to access quality personnel at all levels of IT that they otherwise would not have been able to afford. It creates an economy of scale that would not normally have been achievable for a single company.
This concept has evolved into something referred to as the “total solution.” This can take on many different forms based on the particular organization’s needs; some organizations have completely outsourced their technology needs, while others choose to utilize only specific components. This concept of a “total solution” encompasses many aspects of technology but typically includes the following:
The concept has been successful and companies are working together more and more in order to reduce their IT costs while improving their resources and services. This leveraging has tangible benefits that can be observed by looking at some of the organizations that have become part of the collaborative effort.
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