Outsourcing has become a widely adopted business practice that
helps companies meet the growing need for greater financial and
staff efficiencies. According to market researcher Gartner,
businesses will spend more than $50bn on offshore and near-shore
outsourcing by 2007. As an IT manager, you may not make the final
decision about whether your company uses an outsourcer, but you
will have some input into the decision and you will have to follow
through with a plan for your IT staff. This article tells you how
an outsourcing strategy will impact your IT structure and why it
can be advantageous.
Many IT professionals have never worked for an outsourcer such
as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) or IBM and have a fear about what
it might mean when one of these companies takes over their IT
operation. Rest assured, your life as IT manager isn't over when an
outsourcer steps through the door. Yes, your daily life will change
following a signed outsourcing agreement, but there are many ways
it will not change too.
Systems support
Being a part of an outsourcer's support framework will allow you
to call upon a wealth of knowledge, usually found in centres of
excellence. These centres of excellence allow you to escalate
issues that, previously, you would have had to send to your former
third-party support supplier or perhaps have had to post in an
appropriate newsgroup.
All outsourcers' staff members have an extremely strong
Microsoft focus because the skills in the Microsoft product set are
easy to recruit for and easy to teach. Plus, the product roadmap is
well defined, which enables the outsourcer to plan migrations,
product offerings and strategies several years in advance.
All outsourcers -- even IBM, which has a very strong Unix, Linux
and mainframe story -- will primarily focus on the Microsoft
product set because of its existing prevalence in the enterprise,
user familiarity, ease of training and available resource pool. It
is a fact of life that administrators and other IT professionals
with skills in Microsoft's product set are easier to recruit and
generally have wider experience in their product disciplines within
the IT industry. Unix administrators were prone to remain at one
location longer than Microsoft administrators. In an environment
where reduction in costs is the unstated objective, Microsoft's
products represent the best solution for any outsourcing
company.
There are some activities in the systems support tasks area that
will be taken out of your control. For some of you overworked IT
managers, that could be good news. Outsourcers invest heavily in
enterprise-scale hardware and operating system monitoring
solutions, such as HP's OpenView, BMC Software's Patrol or
Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), and your servers will be
monitored by a central team.
When the central team can take care of a problem, it will. It is
only if the team needs specific local input that you will receive
support calls through the help desk system or MOM, if deployed,
taking a data feed using a software connector from the centralised
monitoring package. A decision will be made during the due
diligence process as to whether the existing help desk system will
be used or replaced by the outsourcer's preferred solution.
A key difference in using an outsourcer is that the outsourcer
may replace the patch management solution you currently use with a
centrally controlled solution. The outsourcer will likely use
Microsoft's Software Update Services and will lock your servers so
you can only use a cascaded system of updates. Only updates that
are centrally approved will reach the locally deployed update node
of the patch management solution.
Windows server and workstation builds
An outsourcing organisation has a great number of clients that
will be serviced to varying degrees. Some customers might only want
to "body-shop" (ie. provide skilled resources when necessary) their
support while others may wish to outsource their entire IT function
including their IT strategy.
When a company takes on a full outsourcing program, one item
that will certainly have a degree of commonality is the
standardised Windows server and workstation build that the
outsourcing company mandates for customers. That means that if
you've been using the workstation build pre-installed by your PC
supplier, you will need to begin using the build required by the
outsourcer. Using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) and the
Operating System Deployment Feature Pack (OSDFP) will enable you to
connect a bare PC to the network and deploy the outsourcer's
mandated build, and subsequently, applications, to the right
system.
Build standardisation is set by outsourcers because settling on
one enterprise-class system to replace a range of workgroup-class
drive imaging solutions reduces the number of variables across
customers and increases commercial efficiencies. Basically, the
greater the number of differences means that more support people
have to maintain a given solution or customer, and that increases
the outsourcer's cost which will then be passed onto its
customers.
If you can standardise each customer as much as possible by
using common technologies and builds, then the number of problems
and solutions to those problems can be fed to and received from the
central teams. That is not to say that every customer of a given
outsourcer has an identical desktop, but the underlying build will
have the commonality and there will be a degree of customisation on
top of that to maintain the customer's desires and possibly their
branding.
The bottom line is that being a part of an outsourced
organisation allows you to be part of a much larger virtual
team.
Centres of excellence
Just because you have been outsourced does not mean you are
subordinate in every way to the outsourcing organisation. In fact,
individuals in your organisation may feel more appreciated and
challenged by working in conjunction with an outsourcer.
Many outsourcers recognise that a client's IT organisation has a
team of individuals who are significantly underused but who have
talents greater than the positions they hold in their organisation.
The outsourcer may then decide to set up, for example, an Active
Directory centre of excellence within your team and focus its
activities at your location. Members of an Active Directory centre
of excellence could be regarded as experts in Domain Controller
replication architecture, lingering object handling and, should the
worst happen, forest recovery.
When an organisation is outsourced there will be network
connectivity established between the outsourcer's parent network
and the customer's network -- subject to the usual network security
constraints, of course. You will be able to better use the skills
of your IT staff and spend more time on your company's IT
infrastructure tasks. This allows you and your colleagues to
continue working in an established centre of excellence in a
location that you (presumably) find desirable. You can also broaden
your experience. These are just a couple of the many reasons why
working with an outsourcing organisation should rarely be feared.
Mark Arnold, MCSE+M, Microsoft MVP, is a Technical Design
Authority for the Capita Group, a U.K.-based business process
reengineering organisation, where he provides advice and technical
designs to the business process transformation teams for internal
customer and local/central government accounts. Arnold has been a
Microsoft MVP in the Exchange discipline since 2001, contributes to
the Microsoft U.K. "Industry Insiders" TechNet program and can be
found in the Exchange newsgroups and other Exchange forums. You can
contact him at
mark.arnold@msexchange.me.uk.
This article originally appeared on
SearchWinIT.com.