Taking the third option

Many organisations are moving to a ‘best of both worlds’ between insourcing and outsourcing – Managed Services.

Efficient management of IT Support has become a crucial issue for organisations across all sectors. It is being increasingly recognised not only as a means to improve the whole business, but also as an instrument to create strategic advantage and added business value.

Many organisations identify two distinct types of management options for their IT Support – controlled and visible in-sourcing and the apparently cost-efficient outsourcing.  But for organisations dealing with high value users, non standard applications or sensitive data, outsourcing can represent too big a risk, leaving the single option of keeping IT Support in-house. Financial institutions, law firms, professional services businesses and some sections of the public sector may well then believe that they have no option but to ignore a potentially sizable benefit in cost and efficiency.

However, there is a third option embraced by a diverse pool of organisations such as software giant Microsoft, public sector body Serious Fraud Office and law firm Simmons & Simmons that allow the utilisation of outsourcing benefits with none of the drawbacks – the Managed Service.

A recent survey of CIOs showed that 19 per cent of those interviewed are already using Managed Services for their IT Service Desk, and that number is expected to rise to 34 per cent towards the middle of 2011. According to participants in the CIO Market Pulse Survey for Management Excellence they chose Managed Services primarily due to a lack of appropriate internal resources, a desire to retain control and the need to reduce costs.

A Managed Service was seen as the best option for their organisation because it was thought to be less risky than traditional outsourcing and more efficient than internal management. In fact, this solution can be regarded as more than just the halfway house between insourcing and outsourcing, it is now in many cases a superior solution incorporating all the best features of both and none of the weaknesses.

Its main strengths are similar to those of outsourcing – for instance, the provider manages all aspects of the function, from staff to operations and is responsible for Service Level Agreements and TUPE. The differences mainly involve the physical location of the team, with a Managed Service utilising the clients office space and infrastructure and an Outsource placing the team anywhere in the world.

Although outsourcing is universally assumed to be the cheapest option since it is often carried out in countries where the cost of labour is very low, statistics show that overall cost savings often don’t exceed a mere 10-15%. In fact, when the possible degradation of service and inevitable cultural changes are forced into the user base and given a cost, the actual saving can be in low single digits. The problem becomes even more acute when the user base comprises staff who generate income streams or are a high salary cost to the business.

Using high value users’ time to prop up a poor performing support function can easily be costed and the results are startling. Using just an average user cost to a business  of say £20 p.h., simple maths demonstrates that 30 extra minutes per month per user spent interacting with a poor Service Desk, in a 2000 user business will cost it £240,000 p.a. in lost working time. Using the same equation with a Doctor, Lawyer or Banker’s costs produces frightening numbers.

Moreover, offshoring presents an increased risk of data security breaches: there have been many stories in the press of offshore employees selling credit card, health and other personal details collected from client databases.  It can be difficult to control and monitor an office located on the other side of the globe, but the problem of data security does not end with offshoring – even when the outsourced support function is located near the client’s office, all information stored and processed in the systems owned by the provider is at risk, and so is the intellectual property.

If the function is run on the client site and the assets are owned by the client, there is a sense of control over the data and intellectual property. These characteristics make Managed Services similar to insourcing. However, unlike an in-house solution, management of operations, processes and staff is left to the expertise of professionals who are measured via SLA and more often than not, subject to penalties for failure to perform.

Little wonder then that organisations across all sectors are embracing ‘the third option’. Microsoft made headlines when a press release announced that their Service Desk, desk-side services and infrastructure and application support were managed onsite by a provider. Although some of the firm’s critics took it as a sign of weakness, assuming that a software company should be an expert at managing the Service Desk as well, the IT community understood that it was a strategic move driven by the desire to create cost-efficiencies in a safe way. If the likes of Microsoft choose managed services over in-sourcing and outsourcing as the best solution for them, it is likely that the model will apply for many other organisations where control and cost reduction is vital.

It appears that instead of forcing more organisations to offshore to cheaper countries, the economic environment is leading to managed services becoming the favoured choice. According to the CIO survey, 40 per cent of organisations are adopting this option as a result of the economic climate for different aspects of their IT. In comparison, only 26 per cent are turning to outsourcing and 29 per cent are keeping services in-house.

Taking all of this into account, the evidence appears to suggest that the future of IT Support as a business enabler rests on finding the right balance between control and delegation, thus ensuring efficiency meets security in an environment which remains in sight and firmly in mind. Although outsourcing and insourcing still have a place in many organisations, as sourcing models mature and evolve it is becoming apparent that a significant number of organisations will move towards more bespoke, internally managed solutions to meet their particular needs.

Richard Forkan, Director

Find this article on Outsource Magazine: http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/articles/item/3589-taking-the-third-option

What to look for when bringing offshore work back home

If we look at the number of organisations outsourcing their software development, IT service desk or WAN support to India and other cheap-labour countries, offshoring nowadays seems not only convenient and straight-forward, but as easy as abc. But what the media doesn’t seem to cover is an issue that is not at all uncommon: it hit Barclays, Quark, Dell and a large number of other companies – what happens if all is not well and you have to take the offshored back in-house?

The phenomenon has already been dubbed ‘backshoring’ in the US, where 30% of Fortune 500 companies have experienced it, according to Oxford Analytica. As for the UK, a survey conducted by the National Computing Centre found that 14% of the respondents who have used offshored facilities for their IT have switched work back to the UK, and another 24% are considering the move. This means that nearly 40% of organisations haven’t found offshoring satisfying.

However, the problem is that once you decide to reverse the decision, the process is not trouble-free. Of those who have taken services back in-house, 30% say they have found it ‘difficult’ and nearly half, 49%, ‘moderately difficult’. When we talk about IT, in fact, we are dealing with the pulsating heart and veins of a modern business, where everything seems to rely on technology. So the costs of reversing an offshore operation do not only cover the facilities and assets – it extends to data security, staff skills, system disruptions and inefficiencies, low user or client satisfaction, client loss, and maybe much more. What happens to the CIO who proposed or supported the offshore move?

Let’s look at some examples. Barclays’ recent ‘divorce’ from Accenture appears to be peaceful and grievance-free, just the best answer to their present needs. When the application development and management of their banking systems were assigned to Accenture in 2004, around 900 employees were transferred to the provider. But only 230 are expected to be taken back. What happens to the various development, support and maintenance staff and their skills every time they are shifted to the other side? Some are taken on by the new employer under TUPE arrangements – the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations preserve employees’ terms and conditions with the previous company – although the majority will be lost, either voluntarily or forcefully made redundant. Unfortunately, when you lose people you lose their acquired skills as well, and to that there is no remedy.

An organisation which decided to openly talk about their failure is Everdream, which provides customers with remote desktop management services, and that in 2003 decided to outsource their Californian help desk to Costa Rica to aid scalability as their business was growing. Fifteen people were sent to the provider to train the call centre employees ‘the Everdream way’. It turned out to be an ever-nightmare when trainers found themselves dealing with a completely different business culture where the idea of customer service was “move ‘em through”, clashing with the hands-on approach of the firm. The strong foreign accent also failed to impress the customers, who started to complain almost immediately. The ‘shallow talent pool’ led Everdream to pull out, as happened to Dell the previous year: customers unhappy with their Indian technical support launched in 2002 made the company decide to re-route calls back to the U.S. In Everdream’s case, the pull-out was spread across six months, making the transition softer and minimising the damage, and many employees had their jobs back. However, it did take some extra financial effort to take the work back in-house and the long-term damage, the relationship with customers, is difficult to measure.

Bad customer service and poor product quality is what brought many Quark clients to switch from their software to Adobe’s InDesign during the Indian experience, never to return – 60% of their customer base, it is claimed. When work was brought back home, the C-executive who decided and led the offshore move was fired without hesitation.

Finally, a mixture of reasons have brought many offshored Oracle projects to fail for a number of US companies, it was reported a few years ago. Communication problems, poorly skilled and trained developers and enormous cost over-runs were topped with the previously unconsidered difference in the Indian law system. Oracle jobs were re-shipped back to the US, but the unrecoverable financial loss left many organisations strained.

These examples confirm the findings of research in the area: the most popular reason for failure is the lack of preparation and execution not on the provider’s but on the client’s side. An organisation needs to be prepared and know what they want from the provider and if offshoring is the right move, to avoid disappointment. Poor joint planning is also often at the root: if the client does not clearly outline and clarify roles and responsibilities, expectations, performance metrics and flexibility prior to signing contracts, there is not much to be expected. Service Level Agreements have to be clear for both sides and have realistic metrics and targets. Experts also suggest defining an exit strategy for contract end or for under-performance, as in fact poor vendor performance is another important reason for failure. Problems related to communication between the in-house and offshore team and to their different culture are often the cause of poor execution, as highlighted with the case of Everdream.

It is important to note, nonetheless, that not all outsourcing projects end up in failure. There are plenty of instances where they do deliver real benefits, both in terms of cost-reduction and improvements in service. However, the success stories tend to involve the use of a partner closer to home, able to understand the client’s environment while allowing easier monitoring of their performance.

So in the case of offshoring gone wrong, what should a CIO take into account when considering the costs of its failure?

The most obvious, and often largest, cost comes about when taking down the offshored department and re-installing it elsewhere should things go wrong, either in-house or with an IT partner nearer to home. Then there are the costs related to lost skills: organisations are unlikely to be able to re-employ previously fired staff so it will be a case of starting again from scratch. New staff will have to be found and trained, and it will take time before service levels are sufficient to deal with business demand – meaning costs could quickly run to seriously damaging amounts.

Technical issues like data security are also not to be overlooked. Different countries have different laws, and might not be so respectful of the privacy of your data. It can be lost, stolen and leaked by redundant employees abroad, legal protection from whom might be weaker than in the UK.

Finally, one last consideration for any CIO is the cost to them as an individual. Should a project as controversial as offshoring fail the responsibility is likely to rest squarely on the shoulders of the person in control. This means ensuring offshoring is really the right path for your organisation is key, as is making sure you are able to clearly demonstrate that it was the partner, not the process, that was at fault should things go wrong – both of which being easier said than done.

 Adrian Polley, CEO

 This article has been published on CIO UK: http://www.cio.co.uk/article/3217488/what-to-look-for-when-bringing-offshore-work-back-home/?intcmp=HPF3