IT Outsourcing

To Outsource or Not to Outsource

Information Technology (IT) plays a very vital tool in the strategic advantage of one's industry. The question on to outsource or not is not an easy decision for every industry.

The proliferation of the Internet and entreprise-wide activities presents numerous opportunities to use IT for strategic advantage and greatly demands higher technical skills(Sole,et.al, 2006)

With the company i've worked with, they outsource customized program suited to our institution. But the cost incurred for outsourcing is too much. If the institution have long-term plan, they should also think that it should be better to update the knowledge of the Instructors and at the same time do the IT work. With this, as Instructor, we are going to have an update knowledge and at the same time have enough knowledge to share with our students.

That's why, for me, i don't like the idea of outsourcing. As institution, as possible, they should always think of enriching their staff. I was reminded of the story about the programmers who make the online reservation for the airlines. They have good minds to think of it that it would be a good market in the near future. They've got millions out of it. See, they don't really need to outsource people if they are prepared.

For rapid organizational change because of companies who wanted to be on top in terms of technologies, outsourcing would be their best solution. State for instance, the General Motors, which is the largest outsourcing deal in the history, began it's first phase of a $15 billion deal to create a single global IT organization for the company (Hoover, 2006). They admitted that for the last year, they lost $8.6 billion and admit that the technology was its secondary problem. But we cannot still guarantee that they have the best solution to the problem because it we still do not see the actual output of the said plans.

With this, I am asking for your comments about IT outsourcing.

References:

Hoover, J. Nicholas "GM's Massive Outsourcing Deal Up And Running", http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192701131&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_All, Sep 11, 2006 08:00 PM

Sole, Deborah L; McFarlan, Warren; Nolan, Richard "A knowledge-based model of IT outsourcing for the network era", http://www.hbs.edu/research/facpubs//9697/ 97-076a.html, January 6, 2006