IT Employment

Your are completly right when you say it comes down to cost. Outsourcing looks incredibly good on the books because all the "employment" costs like super, sick days ( see as an unpaid debt ), health benefits etc aren't there.

In saying that, IMHO i believe that outsourcing looks good on the books only for the first 5 years or so. After that things like customer satisifation ( staff members ), response times etc start taking their toll. It only takes on C level person to have to wait for printer driver install or basic OS fix and you'll see management seriously re-considering outsourcing.

All I can think of worth adding is to consider the source of complaints. If its the users, it is a legitimate concern. If it is the former IT team, double check the facts.

I work for a firm that supplies technicians & engineers for its clients. Thing with outsourcing is that client has more control over outsourced staff. For example, when work needs to be done, they just say, what and until when. Everything else is upto us; we get our support not from our client but from own company. I have been observing the staff of our client. Their efficiency is well bellow their potential (at least I hope so:)) and still, they have nothing to worry about so far, job-wise. In case of my company, pressure is to be fully compliant with clients instructions and to please them. My company pays for all my technical training, takes care of replacement in case of sick leave or vacation... But this has its price. My counterpartemployed by client earns about the same as I, altough clients firm pays more than twice the amount for me as it does for him (his technical training included).

Interesting in the arguments about the human factor. I think as business needs and I.T. merge, the realization of companies to control your their destiny will become present. Staffing problems usually come from poor management / leadership.

Outsourcing it stupid to me, when you build a product and expect someone else to maintain it for you. When support techs cant exchange knowledge with the engineers who build it easily, then customer service goes down.

If a company hires some tech from another firm to be in house 40hrs a week. I dont see that as much of a problem. However ,in the long run, not sure if they save money. Since they are billed at high rates.

You made a good point there, but there are other factors, that we need to take into consideration. Company that pays us for technicians had their own technical support staff and software development. Couple of years ago they decided to outsource everything, which proved to be an expen$ive, but also reliable solution. If backups get screwed, computers break down, servers have abnormal downtime, software works poorly, software is underdeveloped... they are covered by terms of contracts. If their own employee would do something stupid, they couldn't ask him for reparations in 10's of thousands of $ . They expect that from company and we've had cases, where our client got reparations in money becasue of mistakes, that would otherwise cost themdearly.

I'm aware of some contracts having penalties and mistakes happening though in the true sense, I haven't heard of that many payouts. I actually find the opposite in where the potential for blackout is so great that any enhancements to an outsourced system ( e.g. ERP Peoplesoft) is costed to such an extreme that it is decided to develop in house as a cheaper solution. Show me a company who have outsourced their ERP and I'll find 10 shadow systems that could have been in the ERP package except the Outsourcers wqnted to much for development. Which goes back to my original argument i nthat everything is 'billable hours' and there is no inovation or R&amp.