Given a landscape littered with failed outsourcing contracts and organisations left significantly under-performing as a result, wholesale outsourcing is, rightly, out of favour. If organisations are to deliver value from IT, there needs to be a significant shift in mind set - away from cost and towards quantifiable service improvement.

Rather than a wholesale replacement strategy that fundamentally ignores any areas of business excellence, many organisations are now adopting a selective sourcing strategy, using experts to fill the gaps in key areas of knowledge or service delivery.

By having short, regularly reviewed contracts, selective sourcing ensures the business' strategic needs are addressed as well as tactical requirements for enhanced performance. However, if this approach is to successfully deliver value, and not fall into the trap of multiple, unfocused sourcing agreements, organisations need to be very clear up front about goals and objectives. 

For those organisations that can identify just which elements of the IT infrastructure are failing - from lack of skills through to poor processes - the use of a selective sourcing model to address the problem can deliver immediate real business benefit. By using experts - rather than a generic, "all things to all people" monolith - to deliver a specific service that cannot be effectively achieved in-house, an organisation can improve the value delivered by IT as well as reducing the risk associated with its delivery.