Checkpoint in the IT Career

Change is coming fast and furious, and in the eye of the storm are applications. I’ve seen entire IT departments go into scramble drills to see if they possessed the necessary personnel and talent to bridge the gap as their organizations embraced digital transformation. And by digital transformation, I mean the ubiquitous app or service that can be consumed from anywhere on any device at any given time. For organizations, it’s all about making money all the time from every possible engagement. Remove the barrier to consume and make the organization more money is what digital transformation is all about.

There are new roles and responsibilities to match these new tech paradigms. Businesses have to balance their technical debt and deficit and retire any part of their organization that cannot close the gap. Ultimately, IT leaders have to decide on the architecture that they’ll go with, and identify whether to buy or build that corresponding talent. The buy and build talent question becomes THE obstacle to success.

There is a need for IT talent that can navigate the change that is coming. Because of the increased velocity, volume, and variety that apps bring, IT leaders are going into binge-buying mode. In the rush to accomplish their goals, they don't take the time to seek out latent talent that is likely already in their organizations. Have IT pros become merely disposable resources? Are they another form of tech debt?

Buy or build? This is the billion dollar question because personnel talent is the primary driver of innovation. That talent turns technology and applications into industry disruptors. Where does your organization stand on this issue? Are they building or buying talent? Let me know in the comments below.

  • It's a challenge I can sympathize with, when top level executives seek to reduce costs by outsourcing to less-expensive overseas service providers.

    But we've been watching this kind of action for over a hundred years--remember high school history class discussing when California businesses sent laundry to China because it was cheaper than doing it locally, especially during the Gold Rush era?

    Eventually it turned out the service returned to California as people realized using local resources benefits a lot of people and perimeter businesses through the Ripple Effect.  Not only did they get their clean clothing returned much more quickly, they were able to leverage local resources and increase profits while increasing service levels.

    Many businesses fell into that same trap of outsourcing to off-shore / out-of-country solutions to escape paying the taxes and wages that ensured a strong local economy and infrastructure.  And many of them have realized it's to their benefit to return those services to the local / regional solutions adjacent to their plants.

    It's another classic example of those who fail to study History being doomed to repeat it.  How much better off those companies would have been if they retained their internal staff/services, we'll never know.  In one of the examples you cited, it's obvious a seven-digit negative financial impact would have been avoided by staying local.

  • I worked a 1 month contract that turned into an open ended contract (I left after 3 months) at a company that outsourced their call center/help desk to the Czech Republic. I was hired to fill in the gaps while the transition took place. They had 16 people in this department when they outsourced it. They were supposed to take a month to transition the calls from there to the call center over seas. After 3 months there were still 5 regular employees still there on top of a couple of contract employees.

    The transition did not go well. The volume of tickets that were not resolved on first call went up something like 400%. Tickets were being transferred to the wrong teams and being abandoned all over the place, not getting closed properly, not getting followed up on properly. Simple issues that were being resolved by the call center/help desk were being sent to the desktop support team and wasting their time on issues they should not have normally had to deal with. I do not know if they still have their call center over seas or brought it back.

    Another company, I did not work for them at all, did the same thing in the same area before this company i was contracted for. They expected to save about $400,000 a year in costs by moving their call center help desk services over seas. To give some hindsight to make more sense, this company ships products it makes all over the country. A lot of places that they ship their products to do not have much storage space, so they schedule the shipments to show up and go right from the truck to the shelfs. If a shipment is late, something else is put in its place and the shipment is returned or denied. As a result of the increased issues in dealing with tickets from the help desk, shipments started being delayed and showing up late. This resulted in the product being returned or abandoned. In the first 9 months of the help desk being outsourced, they lost over $1,000,000 in sales due to the issues. From what I herd they brought their entire outsourced department back on site within 18 months.

    When you outsource, you lose that in house expertise and company loyalty. Someone who works in a call center for a company in another country doesn't care about the company or the quality of service they are providing. As a result, quality suffers, and turnover is very high in these over seas call centers. You never get developed talent that is tailored to your specific company and its employees and their needs.

  • A company I worked for outsourced a lot of support work offshore. There was a substantial amount of training up front to get the contractors up to speed. A few months into it we found the turnover rate for the offshore team was quite significant.

  • Ran into that hard with some places I worked in the past.  They preferred the flexibility of pro services so they had little to no support for staff training and once you took the initiative to skill yourself up there was not going to be anything outside the stand 1-3% annual raises come hell or high water.  They know that anyone with any ambition will leave in a year or two but they figure that the low payroll keeps them ahead of the game.  I didn't deal with the numbers much back then so maybe they were right in their case, but it sure seemed like paying $250 an hour for contractors to address relatively simple tasks was a losing game. Especially when any staff who learned even half of what the contractors did were jumping ship left and right.  Definitely feel like there is something to be said for having institutional knowledge and ongoing process improvement.

  • Nicely put kong.yang

    IT will always be seen as an expense only item... (One CFO in a company I worked for a few years ago referred to such expense areas as "profit sucking pigs".... )

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