January 12, 2012: The in-house Information technology department of different organizations often considers outsourcing as a threat.
However many experts believe that this anxiety is misplaced. According to them, the day to day schedule of the IT department will consists of huge chunk of housekeeping every day, tasks which are routine and time consuming, but necessary. About 80 per cent of the IT department’s workload comes from the maintenance of existing infrastructure. Along with this, the IT departments are also asked to work on the new business requirements without increasing the manpower.
Availing the service of an outsourcing service provider will take a part of the IT departments load and the work can be done quickly and cheaply. But this might take out the jobs of those in the in-house IT department. This fear is not totally an irrational one in the case of those who ensures a proper, system-steady state, which can be performed by an outsourcing service provider; it is quite easy to conclude that the employee’s days in the work place might be numbered.
This is a concern that haunts some of the employees and as such their skills, time, and efforts are often being squeezed to make sure that a standard level of service and uptime is maintained. In most of the cases the default choice for many of the organizations would be to expand the in house IT department to cater to the increasing needs. Even though such a move will relieve the pressure from the team, the better option is to outsource.
Expert’s comment that the outsourcing or IT functions such as website hosting should be considered as a business decision and not as a means to reduce the number of employees. According to them, by letting third party service providers to manage legacy systems, the IT department can concentrate its energy on business growth plans and for enhancing the skills of the existing employees.
The main benefit of outsourcing might be enjoyed by the less experienced employees ho will get an opportunity to handle challenging and strategic work early in their career and thus to gain required skills in the process. Engaging the employees in high value work will bring in more value to the business. The enhancement of skills and concentrating on interesting work will ultimately improve the morale of the employees and reduce the employee turnover. This will finally provide opportunity for the company to save money and to improve efficiency and work place culture.
