IT governance 'must be prioritised' before offshoring

Low-quality IT governance may lead to a number of companies looking to offshore providers, and in effect losing more money instead of saving valuable assets during the recession, an expert has said.

Making his comments to Computing at the Forrester IT Forum in Berlin, technology analyst Euan Davis explained that chief information officers are happy to pass off IT operations to a foreign provider before looking at the inner efficiencies of their own operations.

He explained that if internal processes are weak, such as the lack of adoption of software asset management or customer relationship management (CRM), a business may be inadvertently haemorrhaging their allocated IT budget.

Mr Davis told the news provider: "If businesses can't specify what they want or craft service level agreements effectively, they will lose the savings they were intending to achieve in the first place."

One organisation reforming its inner systems is the North East Chamber of Commerce, which agreed terms to improve its CRM technology to deal with more customers in an efficient manner.