When it comes to considering whether “technology outsourcing is right for you” many companies and individuals have an opinion and stories to tell. Good stories and horror stories.
The truth is obviously somewhere in between.
These anecdotes and tales coupled with personal experiences of certain business owners have raised extensive debates on the pros and cons of outsourcing. We also intend to take part in these debates by covering IT outsourcing with real-life examples in order to help the reader make informed decisions when considering outsourcing certain procedures to a third party.
Risk-Benefit Analysis
The first step to outsourcing Managed IT services—storage, security, data analysis, help desks etc.—is understanding what outsourcing entails; which is delegating a project or work detail to a third party while acknowledging the fact that ensuring its quality is totally out of your hands—which is a scary thought. So simply put, your major fears are:
- Relinquishing Control: the thought of leaving the performance of any core part of your business process to a third party provider is enough to give anyone sleepless nights for the feedback you receive may not give you a full picture on the progress of that project. Thereby paving the way for disappointments.
- Finding an Experienced Outsourcing Firm: the field of information technology is one that requires the experienced hands of a tech professional which is quite difficult to find. Therefore as an outsourcer, you would always have that doubt concerning if you might be making the wrong choice or not.
- Dissension in the Ranks: Outsourcing is a way to save cost but when it affects the morale of your employees who see projects of their colleagues been outsourced to a third party, the question of job security will definitely raise some brows. For smaller businesses outsourcing, this isn’t so relevant.
Putting Your Fears to Rest
There are tried and tested ways of ensuring you get exactly what you paid for when outsourcing your managed IT services from a third party and these ways are:
- Checking the referrals, portfolio and past projects similar to yours that have been handled by that firm is key
- Ensuring that you have a clear means of communication for keeping up with the project’s progress.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Your IT Services
In the long run, the benefits of outsourcing your projects definitely outlast the negatives that you might come across during your search for an experienced provider you can trust. And before outsourcing to a managed IT service firm, you must have already weighed the pros and cons of how this bold step will affect your business. And if you go ahead with the decision, it definitely means you must have been.
Therefore, these advantages which cut across every aspect of your business from capital management to efficiency include the following:
Managing financial and human resources: Using Google as an example, we all know that the giants have been listed as one of the top 5 firms to work for by every survey carried out by reputable ranking bodies. We also know that they are one of the most profitable Fortune 500 companies out there and that they operate solely in the tech community which is their core business function. Yet it would still come as a surprise to some to learn that as profitable as Google is, they still outsource several of their important business factors or sections to third party firms. It is on record that they outsource jobs like facility maintenance, security and culinary management to third party firms. Although these services are not part of their core operations, they are still important to the running of the organization.
So why do they outsource these positions instead of hiring full-time staffs to handle them? –for we all know Google has the capital to do so— The answer is this; outsourcing can still help the world’s largest firms and your business, manage its capital by reducing expenses such as creating new departments for secondary functions as well as cutting the costs of providing insurance/health plans that comes with hiring full time staff in secondary roles.
Focusing on your core business: every firm operating in a professional field—Law, Accounting, Engineering, Medicine etc.—in most cases have to put approximately 110% in ensuring that their business becomes profitable to both staff and investors due to the situation of our ever-changing economy. These professional niches also make use of storage facilities, help desks, web software and other IT services needed to run a modern office environment and to give these facilities the attention they require will definitely cut into the time you spend on your professional development. Outsourcing to a reputable third party service provider lifts these burdens from your shoulders and allows you to concentrate on your core business operations.
Meeting deadlines, providing quick responses and online security: The ripples caused by a crashed storage facility or by system connectivity issues run through all sectors of a business and can lead to the loss of a lot of money, as the occasional crash of Blackberry’s enterprise systems has shown or an AWS outage. And although you may not be running an organization as large as Amazon Web Services, you still owe it to your customer base to provide them with the security they require for sensitive documents. Your clients also prefer you meet their project deadlines as well as provide timely responses to their queries and outsourcing some of these functions will definitely help you in putting the smile they deserve back on their faces.
Recent Comments