As well as the obvious benefits of using an outsourcing provider, there are other less directly anticipated outcomes, which include the (sometimes unexpected) improvement in the manageability and control over the functions or processes outsourced. It is possible that these processes might not have been as well-defined when the service was delivered in-house and, as such, this consistency is also likely to help with compliance. Many customer organizations are beginning to see the advantages of this and are therefore using more third parties.

Vendor organizations have, of course, picked up on this and are advertising the fact that they comply with various pieces of legislation, industry standards, and regulations. Most vendors cover their procedures under ISO 9001:2000, and if one takes, for example, legally admissible and evidentially weighted standards for scanned documents, vendors will follow the guidelines of the British and international codes of practice, BIP0008.

However, there are still concerns over factors such as flexibility and data security when it comes to using third-party providers. Compliance is a big issue for many organizations today, and although third parties can aid compliance, it cannot be handed over as a responsibility to an outsourcing provider. It is the responsibility of the customer organization to ensure that any legislation or regulations that it must comply with are also complied with on its behalf by any third party that it uses. Using an outsourcing provider does indeed take some of the function away from the customer organization, but the responsibility if something goes wrong remains very firmly with the customer.

Using a third-party provider can help customer organizations in their compliance requirements, be it a directly expected outcome or a happy side-effect. It remains a risk management issue for the customer organization to determine the value of using a service provider in terms of compliance benefits. However, responsibility for compliance will always remain with the customer; therefore it is incumbent upon the customer to retain an in-house management team for third-party relationships, where responsibility includes ensuring that compliance requirements are continually being met.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)