Service management and IT sourcing

The core task of financial service providers’ IT/organizational units is to ensure the medium- and long-term supply of institutions with adequate, economical and future-proof solutions to implement business objectives and strategies while taking into account the legal framework.

In order to fulfill this role as an internal service provider, the IT unit must define an adequate service portfolio and agree service levels for the provision of these services with its clients – the business departments of the institutions. In addition, the IT unit must define an IT sourcing strategy that is in line with the business strategy. As part of this strategy, it must determine how services can be provided to business departments in high quality and at a reasonable cost. Key issues are determining the optimal degree of vertical integration of the IT services to be provided in-house, selecting an adequate service scope, defining a constructive collaboration model with external service providers, and ensuring active provider management for outsourced IT services.

Module content

Service management – services and processes of the IT organization

• IT as a production factory – challenges of today’s IT work in financial services organizations
• Organizational and IT services – alignment, principles and design of the service portfolio
• IT processes – covering the value chain along Manage, Plan, Design, Build and Run
• Models for the organizational and operational structure – internal structure and embedding of service management in the organization
• Service management against the background of agile organizations
• Scope, content and core elements of individual management processes, e.g. architecture or project portfolio management
• “Demand and solution management” – key interfaces between business units and IT
• Common standards and reference models for IT (e.g. ITIL)

IT sourcing – achieving maximum IT value generation

• “Make or buy” – objectives and content requirements for sourcing strategies
• Sourcing trends and experiences in the financial services industry – from IT, cloud (infrastructure and software-as-a-service) and business process outsourcing to platform-as-a-service
• Critical success factors of IT sourcing
• Base case and business case – cost transparency and cost assessment in IT sourcing
• RfI and RfP – provider evaluation and decision models
• “Transition & transformation” – successful implementation of sourcing measures
• Alignment and design of the retained organization
• Regulatory requirements for IT sourcing – service provider management and provider control (e.g. through BAIT)