The Outsourcing Institute, a subsidiary of outsourcing consultancy Everest Group, is now accepting nominations for the 2007 Outsourcing Excellence Awards. Nominations can be made by the buyer or the provider, but must be made by Sept. 30. If you are involved with a great outsourcing relationship, maybe you should throw your situation into the hat.

The awards are given in eight categories:

* Best Partnership
* Best Business Challenge
* Best Offshore
* Best ITO (IT Outsourcing)
* Best BPO (Business Process Outsourcing)
* Best EU (European Union)
* Best Healthcare
* Best Financial Services

Lessons learned from last year's winners include:

* Buyers must have a disaster recovery/business continuity plan in place.
* Offshoring actually saves and creates American jobs.
* Even though it's business, it's also about friendship.
* Suppliers are going the extra mile for their buyers. In outstanding outsourcing relationships, it's not just about the money.
* Outsourcers can meet impossible deadlines.
* Healthy outsourcing relationships have a clear dispute-management process.

So how do you get a winning relationship? Of course, you should start by looking for competence in the functions you plan to outsource. A great relationship will not compensate for lack of skills within the ranks of your outsourcer. Reference checks, certifications, and interacting with the vendor will allow you to get comfortable with their ability to do the work. Then you should focus on your ability to work with the vendor. Understand who will be your main points of contact at the vendor and spend time with them during the sales cycle. Make sure there is a sense of trust and an ownership for the outcomes you expect from the relationship. Also, make sure you feel like they listen to your concerns and suggest positive and flexible solutions. You may be spending a lot of time with some of these people, so you need to enjoy being around them.

As any relationship is a two way street, you need to make sure that the key people in your organization are holding up their end of building this new and important relationship. Be honest and upfront about your issues, priorities and expectations. Create clear specifications for the work to be done and put some serious thought into the needed service levels. Do not hide known problems and hope that they just work themselves out later. You own half of the responsibility to build trust into this relationship right from the start. And while you should not pay too much, don't beat up the deal on price and set your self up for failure later. You will ultimately get what you pay for, and it does not serve your purpose to put the vendor in a loss or very low margin situation. You need them to be motivated and capable of putting their best resources forward to deliver the service levels you require.

Whitepapers

• Accelerating a Diverse Mix of Traffic Across the WAN
• Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-generation Collaboration
• Deploying Virtualized NetWare on Linux Whitepaper
• Driving Business Success Through Workgroup Choice and Flexibility
• Toward More Flexible, Next-Generation Collaboration Solutions
• Collaboration Tools and Organizational Success Whitepaper

View more LANS & WANS whitepapers

Webcasts

• Creating a high performance workplace with wireless networking
• Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance
• How to cut IT costs with wide-area data services (WDS)
• Making data centers the IT strategic focus
• Protecting assets and employees with IP Video Surveillance
• Stay out of the headlines: Detecting and preventing network intrusions

View more LANS & WANS webcasts

Special Reports

• Ethernet Services: WAN options mature
• Keeping Spam at Bay
• Get More From Your WAN
• WAN Optimization: How to rev up sluggish applications
• IP address management in 2008 - six things to know
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more LANS & WANS special reports