Recent toy recalls might be making corporate executives a bit nervous about their outsourcing agreements. Mark Cioni, president of Mv Cioni Associates, a company that helps global businesses improve their outsourcing decisions, says there are a number of areas that CIOs should focus on in order to mitigate problems. First off, he says that CIOs and other executives should ask questions like: what has the provider done to help their client recover from that deviation, and what steps do they take to minimize its repetition? "If a provider says they've never had to recover from a failure, I suggest you consider the possibility they're either being less than truthful (if they're trying to be a best in class provider) or less than innovative (if they're trying to be a truly differentiated provider)," he writes in CIOUpdate. Secondly, he says that CIOs should understand the level of visibility you will have into the provider's processes. Finally, he suggests talking to your outsourcing providers as part of planning how to best prevent service failures and recover from such failures resiliently. "Although the necessity of having such a plan is fairly obvious, we too often see examples of poor planning and/or poor execution."

For all the details on how best to manage your outsourcing relationships:
- read the article in CIOUpdate