Application development and management cannot be outsourced using one single pricing method.

Result oriented contracting of application sourcing is not possible by simply committing to prices and tariffs in an agreement, say Frank de Vries and Alex van den Bergh. The best approach consists of a pragmatic deployment of different tools. A very important area of attention consists of improving governance and requirement management in the in-house organization.

Outsourcing an IT infrastructure is no mean task but in the past few years businesses have gained sufficient experience with this. Good results can be achieved by using these in a standardized way. It becomes quite a different story when an organization wishes to outsource application development and management in a result oriented manner. Applications are least of all ‘commodities’ and virtually any sort of intervention involves a tailor-made solution. The question is which best practices there are for realizing application sourcing in spite of that in a pragmatic, result oriented manner.