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Outsourcing has become a trend again. Many companies are currently outsourcing their IT departments or actively thinking about it. The strange thing is that in over 15 years of professional IT experience I have yet to come across a successful outsourcing story. Nevertheless outsourcing remains attractive to corporate management.
The biggest bullsh*t I hear as soon as outsourcing is mentioned is that IT is "not our core business", and thus a good candidate to be outsourced. Cleaning the office is not our core business, and has been successfully outsourced, feeding our employees (i.e. resources) is not our core activity, and has been successfully outsourced, so why not outsource IT, which is not our core business either.
I have a number of points to raise to anyone who is currently somewhere in that particular train of thought:
First of all, to most companies IT is indeed not their core business (because they are not making money from it), but I would like to postulate that it is a core activity. What I mean by this is that to many companies IT is the prime enabler for their business and even though they do not make money from it, losing their IT would mean losing their business. Ask yourself this: if your IT stops for a day, how does that impact your primary business processes? If the IT of a bus company stops life becomes difficult for them, but they can still send out their buses with drivers and transport customers. If the IT of a department store fails they can still (in theory) sell stuff to customers and receive cash payments. However if the IT of a bank fails they can close their doors because their primary business processes rely on IT to an extent that makes it impossible to do anything without the computers being available...
So ask yourself this: Is it wise to lose direct control over my prime business enabler (a core activity)? If the insourcer screws up, whose name will be on the front pages?
The second point I would like to raise is to ask yourself whether you as an organisation are capable of outsourcing your IT. Outsourcing requires that you are capable of:
- Specifying exactly what you want
- Checking whether what you received conforms to the specifications
That's why outsourcing the company cafetaria is so successful: Anyone can explain exactly what they want (food for a 100 employees per day, three types of bread, 2 cheeses, peanut butter and a different soup every day) and it is easy to check if that has been delivered...
Can you say the same about your IT? How good are you exactly at writing specifications and requirements? And how good are your acceptance testers?
Outsourcing is too often seen as a quick win to cut costs. If costs are out of control, why can't companies solve that themselves? |
