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IT Trends In and Out of Downturn
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post has an interesting article talking about how IT industry is changing its business models to survive (IBM: "Pay As You Save"; HP: universal printer driver; Consulting weak; Oursourcing booming), as well as how outsiders view the downturn (Merrill Lynch: it's just another bust after PC and mainframe, but the good thing is, "each 'wave' has so far represented a tenfold increase in the number of technology users."). I'm particularly interested in the outsourcing story. It might explain why IBM will benefit and other vendors like Sun Microsystem which don't have a strong service arm will suffer."
IMHO knowing the business is key. I'm a scientist working in a small high-tech manufacturing company and don't do IT for a living, but I dabble. We have one in-house IT person to handle everything from help-desk to maintaining our ERP system for ~250 people. I take care of the linux boxen and generaly act as a sounding board for the IT guy when stuff ain't working...
When stuff really hits the fan, everyone thinks that their particular issue is priority #1. One of the roles of a well-trained IT staff is to sort out those priorities and get the comapny back to business efficiently. You really need to know how the pieces are interconnected in order to do that effectively.
Another example: my wife works for a large company that recently outsourced most, but not all, of their IT staff. Now, when she has issues with the PCs in her office/lab she no longer has a single point of contact to deal with recurring problems and ends up having to explain the issue from the beginning again with the tech-of-the-day (Can you close all your apps and reboot? Is it plugged in?)... So what happens? One of the people in her group who knows something about PCs ends up being the local "mr. fix it" and ends up doing that instead of his real job.
Yet another example: She ordered a PC to drive a lab instrument since the old one died a horrible death. It took over two months for it to show up. Why? The only authorized PC for that purpose came with a "free" RAM upgrade and a 19" monitor, and even though the PC showed up within days the RAM was delayed. So the PC and, the >$100,000 piece of equipment was idled because it only had 128M of RAM and could not be delivered without the RAM upgrade. Never mind that the old PC that ran the machine had only 32M to begin with. Oh yeah, and that 19" monitor? It wouldn't fit in the equipment rack, so they ended up repurposing it as someone's desktop monitor. Of course the people in the lab knew it wan't going to fit, and mentioned this up front but the package deal could not be unbundled.
The irony of the whole thing was that it later turned out that the PC was incompatible with the data aquistion board required to drive the instrument even though it met all the manufacturer's specifications.
How did they find out? The in-house IT person from a neighboring department dropped by for something else and mentioned that they had found the same problem with their instruments. She found them an old clunker that was up to the job, and had them up and running the next day....
So, if you add up all the time wasted in dealing with these consultants that don't know what the group does or how it fits into the big picture of the company's business, do they still save money over a dedicated in-house IT staff?
You be the judge...
BalamNot at all. He started off with a really dumb idea, but managed to avoid shooting himself in the foot. For the record, the agency I worked for was outside the jurisdiction of the executive branch, so this little adventure had no impact on me personally.
The outsourcing deal was ridiculed from day one. By the time they had it narrowed down to a single bidder, nearly half of all IT in the state had managed to exempt itself. Had Rowland (a Republican) gone through with the deal, the Democrats would have never stopped talking about the long-term commitment that never produced any savings. The same smoke-and-mirrors technology that the Republicans would have used to "prove" savings would work even better in reverse, as the Democrats "prove" cost overruns.
Instead, the decision was made to outsource a few projects where the scope and risk were more manageable. As usual, common sense will prevail, as soon as all other possibilities have been exhausted.
As it happens, Rowland is up for re-election. I would never have considered myself a Rowland fan, but the Democratic opponent is worse.