June 4, 2014 - With many businesses struggling to keep up with the pace of IT change, SQS, the world's leading software quality firm, is calling for businesses to experiment with outsourcing to multiple, specialist suppliers.

A common IT belief is that by reducing the number of suppliers you immediately reduce management overhead and simplify things by having a single point of accountability. However, this often leads to a lack of agility and flexibility as a single vendor controls more of the IT estate and gets bogged down in contractual and commercial constrains. They are also less likely to have the full range of specialist skills for the entire IT estate. By adding a few different specialist vendors, agility and innovation is improved.

With the pace of IT change accelerating at an unprecedented rate, businesses are increasingly being faced with last year's cutting edge application becoming today's legacy system. Earlier this year, Gartner revealed that by 2016, the impact of technologies such as the cloud will relegate even highly customised systems to "legacy" status.

There are a number of ways businesses can tackle these challenges. In the increasingly competitive market, outsourcing provides organisations speed-to-market whilst, at the same time, enabling firms to share the risk. Rather than outsourcing to a limited number of larger suppliers, adopting an adaptive and more flexible approach to sourcing, based on the relevant experience and expertise of vendors, will best deliver the required business outcomes of the project.

David Rigler, director of UK retail and manufacturing at SQS, explains: "This doesn't necessarily mean businesses should shun larger suppliers with plentiful resources. Each supplier should be selected based on its skills, experience and expertise in a specific area and its ability to meet the characteristics of the new IT architecture. For example, suppliers may be selected on their ability to support an agile approach to IT delivery or continuous delivery of testing and deployment."

Ben Fry, manager and quality evangelist at SQS, continues: "Spreading IT delivery across a number of carefully selected suppliers is actually not as crazy as it sounds; it is, perhaps, the most effective way an organisation can keep up with technological advances and the rate of consumer-led IT change. In our experience, most businesses already do this to some extent. One insurance company that we work with has a large outsourcing deal for the majority of their software development but uses a specialist boutique for the development of the actuarial algorithms. We would suggest they take this to the next level and break down the key IT processes even further, outsourcing these to different suppliers based on expertise and specialisation."

Ben and David will be divulging the secrets behind tackling the rapid pace of change in today's IT world at this year's World Congress for Software Quality on 2nd July. With over forty years of experience between them, Ben and David will share their expertise, drawing on real world examples, to enlighten delegates on outsourcing, as well as explaining legacy IT systems, agile development and how to manage transition in today's ever changing technological world.