Outsourcing is done for a lot of reasons. I have seen it done as a result of battles between executives because internal IT was not competent (or did not have good management to give them the tools the needed) and the outsource was to provide competent people. After a while the management tide turned and the stuff was all insourced again.
I tend to believe that insouring is a good thing when you reach a certain size and that outsourcing is a risk but it's also not my money and there are many different strategies around. Outsourcing isn't just to 'them foreners' as the tone of someprevious threads have seemed to center on. Outsourcing can be to IBM glbal services, SAIC, temp agencies, all sorts of things. However onto a more specific example. My first full time IT job was part of a large scale (outsouced) effort to migrate desktops from DOS/Banyon Vines to WIndows NT3.51. This transitioned into desktop support. The way the contract was written was to essentially eliminate most of us over several years. I worked for a company called Entex and we worked onsite at Intel. Every desktop ticket was required (supposed) to have detailed remediation steps and the TAC (Call center) would roll this into knowledge base articles. TACs goal was to reduce dispatch to desktop calls. TAC would meet under a VP and they would go through the largest volume category tickets and do whatthey could to eliminate dispatches and make improvements to their processes. This took many years as the kb was built and the remote tools improved. Eventually a large portion of people were transistioned to laptops and system ivnetory tools were such that if you lost your system, one could drop off a new one and visit a website which would then automatically load all youur licensed applications back on in a few hours. I left before this was finished but I understand it worked well. So, this was a case of a targeted outsource to achieve a long term business goal with less human resource risk to the company. As the goals were met, they were able to pay the outsourced company less and let them deal with who to get rid of (ahem, let go). Steven Peck http://www.blkmtn.org On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Sherry Abercrombie <saber...@gmail.com> wrote: > Guys and gals, > > I've returned to college this fall after about 15 years to finally finish up > a degree I started on about 25 years ago. One of my classes this semester > is Macro Economics. Last night my professor gave us an essay question for a > test next Monday that is potentially 50% or more of our test grade. The > topic is on outsourcing and I wanted to toss this out for discussion, input, > personal experiences etc etc. The questions I have to answer are: > > What is the economic justification given for outsourcing? > Where is the outsourcing taking place? (Obviously, I'm focusing on the IT > field, specifically technical support) > What types of jobs are these workers performing? > What is the benefit to the business? To foreign workers? > > I talked with my professor and told her what approach I wanted to take, from > the end user perspective, and that I had experienced the tech support being > outsourced. She liked that idea a lot. Obviously, I will be looking for > other news articles to support my essay. What I'm looking for is thoughts, > opinions, personal experiences from an end user perspective, has anyone here > been outsourced? What was that like? I'm just taking an informal poll from > a group of my peers that I know has had personal experience in some way with > this subject. > > Try to keep it on topic, I did get Stu's OK before sending this, so a big > Thanks Stu for the use of these lists to help with my exam. > -- > Sherry Abercrombie > > "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." > Arthur C. Clarke > Sent from Haltom City, TX, United States
