Outsourcing can save companies a significant amount of time and money, but only if the outsourcing relationship is smooth and trouble-free. A strained outsourcing relationship can become a huge time suck, and it can also be quite costly. Here are a few Dos and Don’ts for managing outsourcing relationships.

1. Do Insist on Governance

Outsourcing relationships need to be governed. Both sides, enterprise IT and the service provider, need to define expectations and constantly verify performance. Unfortunately, most of today’s infrastructure outsourcing relationships do not have measurable controls in place. The result is that enterprise IT has no way of making sure it is getting the services it’s paying for. There are constant billing surprises and too much time is wasted trying to resolve these issues with the service provider.

2. Don’t Dismiss The Importance of Establishing an Accurate Baseline

When the baseline – the foundation of the relationship and of the outsourcing contract – is inaccurate, the result is disagreement and constant disputes around billing. We’ve seen it many times – frequent billing calls, billing disputes, and the result: a strained business relationship.

3. Don’t Allow The Relationship to Deteriorate! Take Action Right Away

If you do get to a point where the outsourcing relationship becomes strained and there’s a general atmosphere of mistrust, seek help right away. Don’t allow the outsourcing relationship to deteriorate. Even a relationship that seems “unfixable” can usually be fixed if the underlying issues are solved.

4. Do Automate Governance Tasks

Outsourcing governance is the only way to truly make sure both CIOs and service providers are happy with the outsourcing relationship and feel that they’re getting what they paid for. Using tools to automate outsourcing governance and make it as accurate and efficient as possible ensures that managing the relationship does not take so much time and energy from both parties that they can’t properly focus on their core business goals.

5. Do Use Blazent

Blazent aggregates, cleanses, and reconciles multiple sources of IT and financial data to deliver a single, reliable, and trustworthy inventory of IT assets. Blazent addresses the issue of incomplete and inaccurate data by tracking and resolving conflicts on every field between data sources. It checks each source against all others to ensure data from multiple sources is cleansed and normalized. Blazent then applies sophisticated logic to take the best data from each source, and then synthesizes this into an accurate and complete asset record. Blazent takes the best from each data source and creates a trusted, golden record and inventory. Blazent then drives this trusted inventory back into your source systems. By doing this, Blazent solves the common issues of an inaccurate database and of a lack of visibility and transparency in outsourcing relationships.