Besides cost-cutting, one of the main goals of outsourcing (especially IT) business functions has been to redeploy resources to focus on your firms core competencies, this is often referred to IT outsourcing.
However, many companies have found that outsourcing anything from Customer Services to their Tech Department, whether it be half way around the world or to a local company, goes hand in hand with a huge transfer of control and responsibility. Whether the service provider can guarantee the quality and timeliness of their service delivery is a moot point, and the legal situation is also often unclear—legal aspects aside, would it make financial sense to legally pursue a tech service provider in their jurisdiction losses they cause you?
Gifting control and decision-making to an outsourcer can make it difficult to manage risk and to take advantage of strategic opportunities when they arise—it leads to a loss of skills within the company, which might be sorely missed at crucial times.
The web is awash with outsourcer-bashing, with managers bemoaning second-world service levels and widespread failure to meet expectations. Indeed, many companies are bringing affected services home, as is happening with the many manufacturing activities that are returning to the West from their ever-costlier Asian bases. Others are at least evaluating more closely where such services are best rendered.
The cost of quality is the Achilles heel of many of these deals—being unable to control quality leaves a company open for potentially fatal quality issues. ‘Insourcing’ is flourishing, while outsourcing contract lengths are shrinking as technology promises new ways of doing more with a lot less. The ready availability of skilled workers in the US has made insourcing even more attractive there.
Insourcing requires planning timescales of up to 2 years, and requires huge amounts of resources, including added labour and software/hardware procurement costs. It also provides a wonderful opportunity, however, to do things right. Giving Information Technology its rightful place in the organisation and recognising it as a core competency is paramount among these.
Most of all, so-called ‘rightsourcing’ can bring back those functions the company needs to control and master, while taking advantage of cost reductions by outsourcing certain (routine/repeatable) services to a number of carefully-chosen providers. Outsourcing activities instead of responsibilities puts you back in control, and is driven by developing a true understanding of IT costs.
So rightsourcing means to focus on your core, stay responsive, but to do more without owning assets or managing routine processes. It’s the best of both worlds…
If you are looking to stream line your business costs by outsourcing certain IT functions to a local IT company then give Green Cloud Computers a call. We are seen as the trusted IT department for many companies in Ashbourne, Ratoath, Meath and surrounding counties.
