Outsourcing

Author : DAOUDI Samir | Context : MSc Software Engineering – Professional issues in computing

The last decent was marked by a huge improvement in Information Technology & Communication field. In fact, many technologies have been developed, designed and a lot of solutions were created.

This enhancement created a huge diversity in IT roles and many jobs were created, we see nowadays some jobs that would never exist without the improvement of the IT solutions as:

– SharePoint farm Administrator. – Oracle DBA
– C# developer…etc.

And IT professionals have to be more specialized and refine their knowledge to keep their place in the market.

For the companies, this improvement provided a lot of benefits for their business. However, for the IT departments it implies having different engineers specialized in each field in order to support the different solutions and architectures. This cannot be possible for small companies that use different solutions; it was the reason for the appearance of a new form of support especially for IT operations.

Companies in certain situations prefer having a contract with 3rd parties companies to support their infrastructures and/or solutions and this is known as the outsourcing.

Definition of outsourcing

Outsourcing can be seen as the purchase of materials and standardized good, it can also be more than this and be defined as a long-term relationship of a company with external provided for activities that was performed internally before (Vincent.J 2006).

Outsourcing is not really a new idea; it’s one of the oldest hot business ideas. A carpenter paid someone else to cut down a tree for wood. Outsourcing is hardly a new business practice, offshoring a specific subset of outsourcing is moving a noncore operations overseas (Nicholas.C 2006).

In my company, we use outsourcing for long time and in different teams (Network, Back Office, Applications). We have an Microsoft Infrastructure Win XP & 7 for the clients and Win 2003 & 2008 for the servers, the databases are generally hosted in SQL Servers and we use Microsoft Exchange and SMS. Recently we bought a new software that require a 3-tier architecture where all the servers have to run Linux Redhat. The supervisors proposed to train the engineers and recruit new Linux administrators, but as we do not have enough time to be trained and master Linux environment, the management decided to outsource this part and give the support of the Linux stations to a 3rd party company. We’ve put in place a contract determining the obligations and responsibilities of each party.

Except the confidentiality point that can be discussed for this method, it is successful, companies are taking in charge some parts of the support tasks and the engineers are learning from these experts. I personally think that outsourcing can provide a lot of benefits for companies and business.