The per port charge however is the de facto standard. If you as the customer tried to do the MAC billing, unless it was a deal breaker the vendor would push back HARD. They would need new tooling to manage and bill that which costs a lot to develop relatively speaking.
Thanks, Brian Desmond [email protected] c - 312.731.3132 From: David Lum [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 1:41 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Outsourcing Discussion I was outsourced. I worked for Textron for about 10 years, then they outsourced their support IT staff - server admins, Help Desk, etc - to CSC (www.csc.com<http://www.csc.com>). Bryan's first paragraph described the experience pretty well, all the way down to and including "...took 72 hours, prior to the outsourcing it would have been resolved in less than a few hours". I worked in the same office working with the same people, but the procedure change was excruciating. Case in point (I even brought this example up at my interview here at NWEA). Textron and CSC negotiated the contract such that CSC charged Textron for every port that was turned on on every switch. What does this mean? Imagine any time a new employee is hired..."hey we need to find what port on some switch to activate", and when they leave "we need to disable that port". And what if you need an impromptu connection? The guys managing the switches weren't even in the same state! If Textron had a clue, they would at LEAST have said "charge us by MAC address and just leave all the ports on" and then CSC could just audit their address tables once a month. And don't think there weren't a few Linksys grade switches coming off the main switches to ad hoc activate some wall port because the SLA to activate a port was 24 hours. Example 2: Need to reboot a hung server? Cool, but even if the reboot was successful and you knew what the root cause was, you needed to attend a 90 minute change review board meeting - at least until they got to you and no, they didn't start the meetings with the "quckie" stuff either. Example 3: End users weren't happy that no matter how many times they called, they have to give the s/n of their computer, their phone number, etc. It turned out to be an effective way to cut down on call volume. I am convinced Textron did it for two reasons: Many of their competitors were doing it, and it looked good to the shareholders. After two years of this insanity none of the numbers I saw ever bore out any financial advantage, and certainly my end users to a man were far less satisfied with their support. IMO it was a slimy way to spread IT support costs throughout all Textron's divisions because the cost was spread, but the mean level of support tanked. I left CSC because I couldn't stand the overhead of doing my work, my work life became like NetBEUI... David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 From: Sherry Abercrombie [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 5:58 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Outsourcing Discussion Guys and gals, I've returned to college this fall after about 15 years to finally finish up a degree I started on about 25 years ago. One of my classes this semester is Macro Economics. Last night my professor gave us an essay question for a test next Monday that is potentially 50% or more of our test grade. The topic is on outsourcing and I wanted to toss this out for discussion, input, personal experiences etc etc. The questions I have to answer are: What is the economic justification given for outsourcing? Where is the outsourcing taking place? (Obviously, I'm focusing on the IT field, specifically technical support) What types of jobs are these workers performing? What is the benefit to the business? To foreign workers? I talked with my professor and told her what approach I wanted to take, from the end user perspective, and that I had experienced the tech support being outsourced. She liked that idea a lot. Obviously, I will be looking for other news articles to support my essay. What I'm looking for is thoughts, opinions, personal experiences from an end user perspective, has anyone here been outsourced? What was that like? I'm just taking an informal poll from a group of my peers that I know has had personal experience in some way with this subject. Try to keep it on topic, I did get Stu's OK before sending this, so a big Thanks Stu for the use of these lists to help with my exam. -- Sherry Abercrombie "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke Sent from Haltom City, TX, United States ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
