Outsourcing might be a bad idea!

Jun 24, 2015

Sogeti Labs

Many companies think that managing IT infrastructure and/or application is not their primary focus area. Those that consider it important, believe that it’s “cheaper” to outsource the Infrastructure / Application Management (IM/AM) jobs to some other company. It might even work well as long as they’re performing “business as usual” activities.

However, as everybody knows, the “business as usual” phase does not continue forever. IT infrastructure needs to be strengthened not only for tackling high volumes of customers, transactions, etc., but also for implementing system upgrades required to address functional issues or security concerns.

Now, you might wonder… where lies the problem? Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon really; and several companies have been doing it for quite some time! Actually, the problem arises when something new needs to be implemented. In an ideal situation, the customer knows both the process and the technical solution. However, in a worst-case scenario, they don’t have much information about either of these because the job was “outsourced to a trusted partner”. If we adopt the outsourcing approach, nobody wins. At the end of the day, the customer gets things, which are not working properly … and that too after the due/delivery date! This happens because the specifications could not be written in-house (by the customer) due to lack of adequate knowledge/information of the situation.

Then the “obvious” blame game begins! The IM/ AM provider is blamed by the customer even though they were not informed about the faults in the specifications (as it’s expected that it’s the manager’s job to spot the flaw, if any)! Next, the Development teams are blamed for doing things exactly as specified, without realizing that the specs were incomplete. Development might even be done without any option/opportunity to test interfaces against real applications. This clearly is a “lose-lose” situation.

Also think, if somebody asks you, “Could you tell what you’re doing? How do you handle your IT systems?”… would you prefer to direct them to an external vendor (the outsourcing partner) to respond on your behalf or rather provide the answers yourself? Don’t you want to have complete knowledge of your systems and processes and be in full control of the situation?

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Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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