Chapter 4 - Maintaining the Own Responsibility: Selected Information Systems Architecture, Selective Outsourcing and Organizational Learning as a Base for a Sustainably Positioned Information Technology Service
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003
Brought to you by Team-Fly
Outsourcing of IT/IS services is still an actual trend. It offers a lot of advantages, such as a short time to the introduction of new technologies or applications, a guaranteed availability, and so on. But the undiscriminating adoption of this trend tends to reduce IT on a cost factor and neglects the importance of specific IT knowledge for the continuous improvement of business processes.
The establishment and maintenance of internal IT skills is important in any case, at least for assessing the possibilities for supporting business processes.
The typical structure of SMEs does not fit to the offers of the large part of IT outsourcing providers. Typically these offers are tailored for large enterprises or international companies.
A complete outsourcing has some disadvantages, especially for SMEs. The transaction costs will be relatively high and the potential savings will be absolutely low. Instead of a complete outsourcing it seems to be advantageous to externalize permanently only selected technical, non business-specific services.
A selected technical architecture and the application architecture are laying the foundation for highly available, low cost IT. These factors - low cost and high availability - are more important for an enterprise than the immediate adaption of new technologies or of new products or product releases.
The combination of general technical knowledge and specific business knowledge allows a focussed development of the IT infrastructure and an efficient support of business-oriented projects by the internal IS employees.
The management of the IT/IS service group has to regard the sustainability of this department. Aspects of the sustainability are building up and securing actual and future needed skills, securing low support costs, continuing control, and benchmarking with best practices.
The organization of the internal knowledge diffusion improves the quality of service and flexibility.
The continuing feedback between user support on the one hand and planning and project work on the other hand enables broad knowledge about the requirements and allows a focused project management.
The project work is the centre part for the development of the service group.
