The competence of IT outsourcing

Author : John Carroll

Outsourcing is a solution to internal incompetence at either, or both, the business and IT levels. Thus it's quite true that very few CEOs or CFOs credit any part of their organization's competitive advantage to IT, but that says a lot about them and nothing at all about whether IT should be handled internally or externally.

“Passing information control to a third party is a lot like putting somebody else in charge of regulating your heart beat: useful in the short term if your heart is failing, but not a recipe for Olympic success.”

IT outsourcing isn't a sign of incompetence. It's a sign of competence, and deciding where to concentrate limited resources. CEOs can spend their time doing the things CEOs do, or they can type up their own meeting reports, perform data entrytasks, and do other things which are better OUTSOURCED (or just offloaded) to someone else. In fact, "offloading" may be a better word than "outsourcing" given the hackles it raises among IT professionals convinced that Indian programmers will eat their lunch (they won't, but that's a subject for another blog).

That isn't to say that in sourcing doesn't make sense in certain situations. It would be fairly ridiculous for Microsoft not to maintain most of their own sites, as doing so gives them lots of flexibility not to mention real-world experience with their own products. On the other hand, Microsoft didn't build its own fabrication plants for the creation of the XBox. They outsourced that work to fabrication companies that act as hired guns for the creation of custom hardware.

Posted By : Data Entry India

Category Posted: General