| Everyone has a lot of distressed experiences when | | | | including management, engineering, or development, |
| referring to outsourcing. My favorite woe I have heard | | | | and nearly one-fourth keep executive and |
| comes from a software vendor who outsourced a | | | | management functions in-house but look forward to |
| new development project: "They were amateurs and | | | | outsourcing everything else. A lack of oversight, |
| couldn't hit a deadline. It's also why we switched from | | | | management, and even monitoring can have |
| PHP to Java. It was the wrong platform to start." A | | | | catastrophic consequences, since companies rely |
| majority of them will complain in agreement, recalling | | | | more on outsiders. |
| their own horror stories. | | | | Our survey shows that all types of outsourcing |
| However, some bigger questions begin to appear. | | | | continually rise, including everything from traditional |
| Who picked the platform? (The unhappy customer | | | | hardware services and staffing to cloud applications |
| did.) Did the customer check the work daily? (No.) Did it | | | | and full-blown data center operations. |
| have automated status reporting? (It didn't.) | | | | However, there is some sharp dissatisfaction against it. |
| Outsourcing is an essential part of every modern IT | | | | More than half of the respondents surveyed criticize |
| group. However, the problem is that it doesn't seem to | | | | that outsourcing has delivered lower quality, with |
| that we can do it well. Among the 530 business | | | | end-user support and development of customer-facing |
| technology professionals inquired by the | | | | applications. Cloud computing and SaaS receive more |
| InformationWeek Analytics 2010 Business of | | | | favorable reviews, since many people insist that it has |
| Outsourcing Survey, twenty-nine percent of them | | | | delivered better quality and 44% of them are planning |
| have fired a vendor during the last 12 months. You can | | | | to expand use. Nevertheless, there are problems there |
| blame the partner–or grab a mirror. | | | | as well, with almost six out of 10 respondents |
| Two big trends have visualized from this year's survey | | | | depending on their cloud vendors to monitor their own |
| of companies who use IT outsourcing, and both of | | | | performance. |
| them come to the importance of IT managing | | | | Most IT shops have set the right targets for |
| outsourcing better. | | | | outsourcing: the most-valued benefit is freeing up staff |
| One trend is the growth of cloud computing and | | | | for more strategic initiatives, just above cost savings |
| software-as-a-service initiatives–and the disturbing | | | | and better alignment of IT staff and costs with |
| trend of IT trusting performance monitoring to the | | | | business trends. Besides, there are other right |
| vendors, and the other trend is the fact IT outsourcing | | | | problems they're worried about: unforeseen costs, |
| is steadily moving up the stack since vendors adopt | | | | communication problems, and the time required to |
| increasingly strategic functions. About 6 of 10 IT | | | | manage subcontractors. |
| outsourcing shops take over some critical function, | | | | [Source] Software Outsourcing Blog Section. |