Recession ? What Recession ?

Apparantly, in the current financial climate, outsourcing IT is booming as a way of cutting costs. Reuters article - in particularly this section

Overall, the economic crisis has prioritized outsourcing as a tool to achieve critical short-term cost reductions and drive significant, often overdue, overhauls to back-office service delivery models. "Ironically, despite populist backlash, the recession is likely to break through remaining resistance to outsourcing as business becomes more adept at using the tool to cut cost and improve efficiency,"

World`s Largest Outsourcing Service Providers Say Their New Deal Pipelines Surged in 1Q09; EquaTerra Projects Demand to Stay Strong in 2Q | Reuters

Outsourcing company I work for actually hosts Reuters too

... talk about right place, right time when I took this job. Must have had a guardian IT nerd angel looking over me then.

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Comments

CompuTron99

My Guardian IT Angel is too busy playing World or WarCraft to look out for me.

Aldur

I've actually seen alot of this happening lately. Outsourcing and offshoring seems to have become more and more common place since the economy has been in the crapper.

sidsanders

they got the main point: critical short-term cost reductions... i must be deailing with the wrong outsourcing places, there is no cost savings, efficiency improvement... only angry users who hate having to deal with folks who they cant understand., get tickets closed to meet bogus sla's.

the falsification of tickets/status/sla was bad before outsourcing, now its really bad.

Aldur

sidsanders wrote: »

they got the main point: critical short-term cost reductions... i must be deailing with the wrong outsourcing places, there is no cost savings, efficiency improvement... only angry users who hate having to deal with folks who they cant understand., get tickets closed to meet bogus sla's.

the falsification of tickets/status/sla was bad before outsourcing, now its really bad.

You got a point there, outsourcing or offshoring usually all boils down to angry customers who want to go elsewhere. It really makes me wonder what this actually does do to the bottom line. To me it seems that in the long run it will cost more money through upset customers which will have a negative effect on the bottom line. And since it's the bottom line that *most* corporations only care about you would think that they would think twice about outsourcing/offshoring.

I suppose it's all about the short term gains and who gives a damn about the long term effects...

sidsanders

Aldur wrote: »

You got a point there, outsourcing or offshoring usually all boils down to angry customers who want to go elsewhere. It really makes me wonder what this actually does do to the bottom line. To me it seems that in the long run it will cost more money through upset customers which will have a negative effect on the bottom line. And since it's the bottom line that *most* corporations only care about you would think that they would think twice about outsourcing/offshoring.

I suppose it's all about the short term gains and who gives a damn about the long term effects...

for my situation, its all about the image to shareholders... you see investors, we ARE saving $$!!! when you cant get real revenue growth, cut costs!! i suppose publicly traded companies have this a bit worse, at least this particular aspect. i could be wrong though...

our outsourcing is looked upon with disgust by most everyone. ive been in meetings where sr mgmt has to state up front how great the outsourcing is going in order to perpetuate the image of smooth sailing. its both infuriating and sad, they know it isnt true and those of us left to do the work know full well the real story. we have folks building rouge ops groups to circumvent things which is leading to its own disaster -- diff stds showing up, diff methods to do the same thing (svn vs cvs vs source safe vs pvcs vs etc for example) and then things break and the few left have to scramble to fix it.

SmootCIS

sidsanders wrote: »

they got the main point: critical short-term cost reductions... i must be deailing with the wrong outsourcing places, there is no cost savings, efficiency improvement... only angry users who hate having to deal with folks who they cant understand., get tickets closed to meet bogus sla's.

the falsification of tickets/status/sla was bad before outsourcing, now its really bad.

Can I get an AMEN,

The main thing people miss on this is yes it is a great short term answer to saving money, but long term you lose serious quality, and efficiency in systems, which lead toward increases in time for outages, and issue resolution. Money will come back when the economy improves, but the long term damage to your business due to incompetent techs reading instructions from computer screens, is permanent. Not to mention the amount of money they will have to pay someone to straighten out the Rack from all the outsourced "hands" that have been touching it. Patch cables should not look like Granny knitted them in place.

Working for an outsource company is a great way to pay your dues when you first enter the field, but they don't keep experienced techs long. Meaning the Adequate(usually at best) job you received last time you called for help, may not be there the next time you need them.

Outsourcing is okay if you looking for an Adequate at best performance, because your company has an adequate business model, with little drive to strive passed an adequate product.

If companies really want to save money long term why not lay off one of the Vice Presidents of the company hiring 3 good IT techs with his bloated salary, and start automating the Rest of the jobs at the company starting at the highest payed on down (Like in any electronic endeavor always work from easy to hard)

sidsanders

SmootCIS wrote: »

If companies really want to save money long term why not lay off one of the Vice Presidents of the company hiring 3 good IT techs with his bloated salary, and start automating the Rest of the jobs at the company starting at the highest payed on down (Like in any electronic endeavor always work from easy to hard)

sweeeet!!!! i saw outsourcing impact all the tech folks EXCEPT sr tech mgmt... HAHAHA. they insulated themselves quite well. it always seems mgmt never gets outsourced, only rank/file.

Daniel333

No doubt the more partners you work with in your company the farther you are going to be from business alignment. But most small business simply cannot afford to keep it all in house.

Although some companies we work with are keeping 1 or 2 of their guys, and giving the rest to us. Such as, their guy will handle desktop issues so they can keep the responsiveness the need. But leaving the servers and network infrastructure to us.

However you look at it, the SMB relies (seat to vendor ratio?) on its partners a lot more than the enterprise is going to have to. It's a matter of the business taking ownership of processes, business continuity planning and ensure your partners can meet those needs, whether they are IT or your paper supplier.

snokerpoker

I was laid off in April due to outsourcing. My whole department was wiped out and now about 98% of the entire staff has been outsourced to India. I'm very lucky because I started to look for another job even while I was employed with them and started work at my current job the following week.

sidsanders

snokerpoker wrote: »

I was laid off in April due to outsourcing. My whole department was wiped out and now about 98% of the entire staff has been outsourced to India. I'm very lucky because I started to look for another job even while I was employed with them and started work at my current job the following week.

nice!!! its not the end of all things, though it is quite unfun