17% of companies around the world now outsource their IT infrastructure, but It's forecasted that 64% of global companies will be outsourcing their IT infrastructure by the year 2020. Today, over 60% of global IT/business decision makers say they believe that managing IT in-house provides NO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, and yet according to the same survey, 82% are still managing most infrastructure in-house! (CIOinsight.com) It makes sense to outsource infrastructure and the trickle of companies doing it will increase over time.

Apparently, European CIO's have been quicker to pick up on this trend (see page 2, paragraph 3 of  Benkel, Wolfgang. "Market Overview:  European IT Infrastructure Outsourcing."  Forrester, March 11, 2011. Web 30 Sept. 2011) then CIO's in North America.

If IT is finally earning recognition as the driver of top line growth,  why shouldn't the management of IT infrastructure move to the cloud and leave IT free to create innovation and handle projects closest to the dollar? Workplace IT, for one, is a good candidate for outsourcing since doing so would free IT from the need to deal with provisioning, support calls, updates, and hardware refreshes. Certainly companies are ready to make this move. But why is this beneficial move to outsourcing been slow? How does a CIO go about moving his/her infrastructure to the cloud?

Tune in this Wednesday, October 5^th, 2011, to hear the CIO of Akzo Nobel N.V., Pieter Schoehuijs, discuss "So, you need to outsource your workplace IT?" With IDC Research Director, Lionel Lamy, at 9 AM Central on CIO Talk Radio.