Outsourcing vs Inhouse

At a previous employer I was very involved with an outsourced data centre,
after the outsource decision was made (I wasn't involved in the decision).
The outsourcer was a very big name and price but delivered poor service.
Some things to consider: 

*       Your company needs to continue to have someone (or more than one, if
your requirements are great) that will manage this agreement and the
relationship with the outsourcer. If there is no one "minding the store"
there is no way to tell is the outsourcer is doing a good or poor job.
*       Your own company should keep the responsibility for strategy related
to IT, and have the outsourcer do only the tactical work. E.g. you would
keep responsibility for determining the IT direction to go but the
outsourcer would do the scheduling of jobs, backups, etc.
*       Make sure you negotiate a good service level agreement (SLA). Think
about how you want this relationship to work, and try to include some
related measurements. For example, if end user satisfaction is important,
include survey results as one of your measurements in the SLAs. Keep in mind
that SLAs need to be measurable and develop the data elements needed to
support the agreement.
*       Invest the time to figure out who you think should do what before
you negotiate the deal. How much input do you want to have into what types
of decisions. What controls do you need? How will you figure out whether
there are any problems? Document the way you think the relationship should
work, and make sure your company and the outsourcer build the concept into
the contract.
*       Think about how you will determine responsibility when there are
more parties involved. For example, where I worked, there was the software
vendor, the outsourced data centre, IBM, and the client (user). So, when the
system doesn't perform up to scratch, who's responsible for assessing the
problem, determining the solution, and paying for the resolution. The answer
may not be obvious - for example, if you leave _all_ of this up to the
outsourcer, you may not find that there are ever any problems that they
caused themselves!

Best of luck - if you have other questions you want answered privately, you
may contact me directly if you want.

Debbie Gallagher
dgallagher@deloitte.ca

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Original Message
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Hi there I wonder if anyone has recently done an exercise to argue against
Outsourcing AS/400's  and keep it inhouse eg a management summary


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