Outsource Magazine

IT Services Management was one of the first business processes to benefit from outsourcing, perhaps because the skills required to run an IT operation are so specialist. So the March agreement for TATA Consultancy Services (TCS) to take on the running of IT infrastructure services for Malaysian Airlines (MAS) stands as the latest in a long (by BPO standards) and honourable line of such arrangements. And, with the increasing sophistication, capabilities and applicabilities of IT services to the business template, outsourcing looks more sensible now than it did even ten years ago.

The development of IT infrastructure architecture and standards through protocols such as ITIL v3 - the latest version of the industry's benchmark standard - means that understanding not only how IT works but how it can work with the whole business to support and drive developments is becoming a professional attribute in its own right. As well as supporting the airline's Business Transformation Plan (BPT2) and undertaking the IT infrastructure management of MAS' data centres, IT network and IT security, TCS will undertake to, in the words of MAS' own announcement, "set up an ITIL v3 compliant service management organisation under a unique 'Build, Operate and Transfer methodology."

Standards such as those in ITIL v3 may not be the most glamorous element of IT or BPO but with their 'journeyman' ability to get things done quietly and without fuss, they are what will drive the continuing globalisation of business because through agreements such as the MAS TCS deal, it will become easier for firms to collaborate across the unifying platform of a single architecture.

To find out more about the MAS TCS deal, click here.