Outsourcing IT Services and service level agreements in South Africa's retail sector

Bibliography: leaves 81-88.This research project is an attempt at examining the state of outsourcing IT services and the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) amongst the large retailers of South Africa. Questionnaires were sent to all the large retailers, and various respondents from these organisations provided information regarding their involvement with outsourcing IT services and experience with the use of SLAs. The hypotheses for this research aimed to investigate the following; • Which IT services were outsourced, and which were most likely to be outsourced amongst large South African retailers; • Whether outsourcing IT services has given South African retailers a competitive advantage; • Whether SLAs have been used in conjunction with outsourcing IT Services; and • What changes should be made to SLAs to make them more useful when outsourcing IT Services. The findings from this research suggest that 94% of the large retailers in South Africa were involved in outsourcing parts of their IT services. These services were mainly deployment and management of networks, application development and systems maintenance, and support/helpdesk services. Thirty six percent of respondents believed outsourcing had given them a slight competitive edge, while 6% had experienced a substantial competitive advantage. Furthermore, more than 50% of the large retailers used Service Level Agreements (SLAs) when outsourcing their IT services. The most significant change suggested for SLAs is to have better measurement metrics, so as to provide a clearer understanding of what services has been performed by the parties involved