[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hal Merritt) writes: > One just *has* to wonder if the outsourcing was mostly a ploy to > deal with an out of control culture. You transfer all management to > a third party. Let them 'retrain' the troops. Then you bring it back > under new management with new marching orders.
frequently the executive experience for managing IT organization is totally different than executive experience required for operating the rest of the business. this can lead to out of control IT organization. this can also lead to a very political (and potentially unprofessional) relationship between the rest of the organization and the IT organization (i.e. lack of binding legal contracts, inadequate service level agreement contracts, etc). IT services can also significantly suffer ... if the IT organization is viewed as purely a cost center ... and people making budget decisions have little concept about adequate needs for providing quality (and possibly even necessary) IT service ... vis-a-vis budget allocation for the rest of the organization. to some extent this has also accounted for some of the datacenter to desktop transitions; you turned everybody into their own system administrator ... initially eliminating dedicated head count in the (IT) cost center (obviously it cost less if everybody was doing it for themselves). other approaches for dealing with some of the issues has been to turn IT into independent company (moving from an internal cost center to a profit center) .... recent posting regarding the early days of BCS (boeing computer services): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#40 All Good Things outsourcing works fairly well during periods of long term stability. however, in periods of great change ... the ability of an organization to quickly adapt to changing conditions (agility) can be inhibited by arms' length legal agreements. Unanticipated and/or rapid changes in IT services are probably not provided for in the outsourcing contract. Agility and rapid adaptation frequently also involve some amount of experimentation aka trying new stuff for the first time; unless you can perfectly predict the future, not all experimentation regarding unknowns will be successful. of course this then always starts down the boyd and ooda-loop path http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2 and here is a recent ooda-loop reference somebody forwarded to me http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2005/10/doing_the_gover_1.html boyd's briefs had numerous examples from military history about agility being deciding factor in conflicts ... with some tying agility to modern business conflicts C4 was a 1990 project in the automobile industry that was almost all IT-related with an attempt to get time from concept to showroom down from seven years to 18-36 months (putting it on level with foreign competition). recent posting mentioning auto industry agility http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#23 auto industry another minor reference http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006.html#42 IBM 610 workstation computers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
