Outsourcing Makes Life Complicated

This was an IT organization which restructured and we lost our internal employees who worked in application support. Support was outsourced to a third party. The current situation is that support for our application is so bad that internal people have to be trained. An activity that used to take 15 minutes now takes 2 weeks to go through the system.

The Helpdesk

The Lotus Notes team helped us putting news summaries on the intranet. Then management disbanded the team and outsourced Notes support to IBM. The new guys couldn't fix the problems. Eventually we found one person who could help us so we would always ask for him on the helpdesk. Anyone else who need a lot explaining to them before they could do anything. We always went to that one IBM guy when we could.

Tooth to Tail

In the 90s, there was a big push in the armed forces for increasing the ratio of front-line troops to those in support & logistics - "tooth to tail". I oversaw the dismantling and outsourcing of a whole bunch of functions. Then an international peace-keeping situation came along. Fighter pilots weren't needed but toilet truck drivers were because you cannot use contractors in situations where they will be under fire.

Outsourcing Everything?

There has been a tendency to outsource and centralise IT functions across many organisations. Sometimes this makes sense but we have a few very specialised systems where this approach doesn't make sense. It is actually a source of risk as we now do not have control over them and yet the systems aren't documented well enough for us or the outsourcers to understand the complexity.