The Future of Work is Strategic IT Outsourcing

We talk a lot about the changing workforce here at Tehama. We recently came across Deloitte’s research “The Workforce Ecosystem” that provided a clear and thought-provoking perspective around the rising trend of strategic outsourcing from joint ventures, to contractors, to freelancers, and gig workers.

Concerns of the gig economy

Without a doubt, and substantiated by other research firms such as Gartner, spending on strategic outsourcing is growing faster and predicted to grow faster than internal hiring over the next five years. However, many organizations are fighting the change, due to fear and other concerns:

• More than one-third of our respondents (42 percent) worry about the loss of confidential information due to the use of contractors.
• 36 percent are concerned about the reputational risk that could arise from a negative perception of non-traditional employees. 
• Some 38 percent worry about the instability of a non-traditional workforce.
• 39 percent worry about violations or changing government regulations in managing or categorizing these workers.”

These anxieties raise concerns for the enterprise C-Level leaders and boards who need to protect shareholder value and trade secrets, provide ongoing auditing, ensure compliance and governance across global business, shield from data breaches, and manage overall public perception.

There are no software mechanisms to enforce policies and contracts defined on paper.

Enterprises need to leverage strategic outsourcing to access the specialized skills, accommodate work-life integration, and respond to the business’ needs to be agile with market changes. However, they also want to sleep well at night knowing they can extend across their changing workforce segments. Today, this is done via detailed contracts, vendor risk management, processes, and contracts. There are no software mechanisms to enforce policies and contracts defined on paper. Often audits take months to establish third party providers have adhered to the stipulations outlined in the signed agreements. Auditors need to search emails, documents, review detailed log records, and audit third party practices as well.

We see a way forward with a comprehensive IT Outsourcing Strategy built to secure business needs and security needs. Audit, compliance, governance, and security can help organizations move from the “Traditional, Organization-led” workforce model to the “Open, Employee-led” workforce — not hold them back from it — when it can be operationalized into a repeatable, scalable process.

Introducing Tehama, the fastest, easiest, most secure way to enable a remote or hybrid workforce.

Tehama makes this work by moving everything on to the cloud in one SaaS platform. In Tehama, your organization can (1) set policies and better onboard new vendors or contractors, then (2) track how those third parties, such as service providers are adhering to your policies via (3) deep audit and activity logging— the basis for continuous compliance.

Learn more at tehama.io.