4. Maximize employee effectiveness.

It's increasingly challenging for mid-market companies to cost-effectively do everything needed in IT to support business initiatives. Evolutions in business-technology enablement have led to exponentially increased demand to find and retain an IT staff with expertise in a variety of ever-changing technologies. This is a significant hurdle to overcome as experienced technical professionals tend to specialize as they advance in their careers, and most companies need only a small percentage of them across areas of expertise at any one time. Even best-in-class companies with impressive cultures and significant growth opportunities find themselves competing for scarce, specialized, top-level talent.

To address this staffing challenge, many organizations are embracing some form of an IT outsourcing model, which can lead to varied outcomes. These forms include:

• Staff Augmentation. Although sometimes necessary to fill a critical slot, this is seldom a satisfactory long-term strategy.

• Project Outsourcing. This approach can result in deep engagement and high-quality delivery of a project and can allow a company to outsource as or when it's necessary. But it's important to map internal skills and bandwidth to the support requirements. The newly implemented technology won’t run itself and the outsourced project resources may disappear into other projects.

• Targeted Outsourcing. Many companies find success by rigorously defining which technology roles and functions they're going to excel at, and which they’ll outsource to a qualified third party. Sometimes the choice is made pragmatically, based on the internal team's skills, but sometimes it's made strategically, for instance, by outsourcing the commodity support while retaining the strategic work for internal staff. Either way, complete ownership falls to the outsourcing firm for quality and efficiency of the functions they assume.

• Vested Outsourcing. Often, after success with a targeted outsourcing relationship, some companies decide to focus more fully on their core businesses and outsource the entire IT function, retaining minimal internal staff. These relationships achieve the best results when the outsourcer is rewarded for efficiencies and innovation.

When communicating with your mid-market customers, get a sense of where they are with these four keys, and address what expertise you have in-house and how it can help their businesses grow.