Saturday, January 12, 2013

Outsourcing

Types of arrangements for managing resources are as follows

- Inhouse
- Outsourced
- Cosourcing
- Partnership
- Colocating

Main reasons/justifications for outsourcing;
  • Savings (Cost)
  • OpeX (Accounting, Cashflow)
  • Flexibility (Quality)
  • Take advantage of new technologies
  • Core Competencies (Quality)
  • Speed of deployment (Time)
  • Scalability (Quality)
Barriers to changing apps internally
  • Familiarity
  • Inevitability of bugs, patches,
  • Training
Hardware, software (Software as a Service - SaaS), network management (Platform/Infrastructure as a service PaaS/IaaS) and people can be outsourced. Outsourcing companies can be called XSPs meaning external service providers.

Application Service provider, Internet Service provider, Management service provider.

Things to consider

- Strategic value of IT to the organisation
- Future needs
- Transition costs
- Feasibility of separating IT (or elements of it) from the business
- Existing human resources

The next section is how to manage outsourcing arrangements effectively.