With outsourcing, many big corporations are becoming much more fragmented than they were before. It’s often a gradual process, with a bunch of internal staff first being moved only in name, but over time it takes hold in more concrete ways: being kicked off the email system, moved to new facilities off the internal computer networks, deleted from the corporate directories, that kind of thing. (As well as untold “new” people joining the fray.)
Which can mean a lot of inconvenience. Suddenly the outsourced people have all their phone numbers and email addresses change. They can’t easily find contacts within the company. And vice versa. Emails which contain sensitive information and formerly only got sent internally are going out on the live, insecure and slow internet.
VPNs and other hoop-jumping has to be set up just so people can work, and that’s before you start moving whole servers and applications outside the cosy confines of the corporate network.
And God help you if you want to set up an appointment with some busy people who are no longer viewable in your calendaring software.
Is it all worth it? Who am I to judge? Pah, what would us geeks know about it, anyway?
Outsourcing, pah!
Ask anyone who used to have on site IT support what they think of a central helpdesk! If you don’t see the people you feel no sense of belonging and you don’t give a CRAP about their problems.
Ask anyone who used to have in house developers what they think of the results from their Indian project team? (this isn’t a new thing, ANZ was doing it in the 80’s and it didn’t work then either!)
Ask anyone at the hospital where my wife works what they think of oursourced engineering, well apart from the fact that they can’t get rapid response to fix things and last time they needed their emergency generators they DIDN’T WORK!!! Now seeing as people could have died you would think heads would roll wouldn’t you, sack that engineering company and get another one but nope the end result was there was NO penalty to the engineering company – so why would they make sure it doesn’t happen again???
Outsourcing, don’t even get me started!!! (oh you did)