POSTED BY: wkgrt (October 08, 2008 09:18 AM)
The management always reads articles about how great outsourcing is, but in practice the people actually doing work often have more difficulty getting help to the point where they give up and start doing things to go around the systems (I have seen this very often). SAS rarely delivers the performance promised and often does not do what a comapnie's business model requires. Outsourcing works best when there is a particular application that needs to be installed and modified to fit the busniess. So instead of reading articles and white papers, talk to the people actually using it on a daily basis, then decide.

POSTED BY: Dave - CB (October 08, 2008 10:12 AM)
Outsourcing has a bad rap because there are thousands of IT companies out there that just have no idea what they are doing. A competent Managed Service Provider can save money, increase uptime and reduce response time by using integrated tools that allow the HelpDesk and NOC team to respond to requests within minutes or in fact proactively.

POSTED BY: aleck (October 08, 2008 10:33 AM)
Is this a journalistic article or simply a paid product placement? I understand that ads on this web site keep the site alive, but it should be clear what is independently contributed content and what is paid for content.

POSTED BY: Insider (October 08, 2008 12:19 PM)
The cost savings that are advertised by outsourcing companies like Accenture, IBM, etc can be quite expensive to actual system reliability and IT responsiveness. The (largely unpublished) turnover rate for India hover stubbornly at the 25% range, with overseas employees continuously jumping between companies to increase their salary..this creates an chronic experience gap that results in much higher incidences of system failure, and much longer time to recover. The outsourcing companies are financially incented to lay off the extremely experienced American workers to cut costs by transferring the work to cheap offshore labor.. who then quit to take a higher paying job with an offshore competitor for a few rupees more..and the cycle continues. Outsourcing typically destroys the IT talent pool permanently, and the cost savings achieved early on are paid for by a largely dysfunctional IT department very quickly Initially, the transferred local employees, and the retained employees, work extra hard to maintain the professional pride in running the systems they know, but they are eventually overwhelmed by the cost cuts and layoffs of experienced workers which enrich the top tier of execs at outsourcing companies...especially true of Accenture. The result are massive project failures and lawsuits, as a Google query will show. London stock exchange, Texas department of health, Wisconsin voter system..etc

POSTED BY: rht (October 08, 2008 03:43 PM)
I have yet to see offshore outsourcing come up with the same quality of output at the savings promised. It usually puts more stress on onshore resources because of time zone differences and lack of business knowledge of the offshore tech school grads. I saw one outsourcer have to bring in onshore specialists to save a project botched by their offshore branch resulting in a late and overbudget result.

POSTED BY: Mrs Wright (October 08, 2008 07:49 PM)
The mid job class that corporate America is outsourcing is destroying America. Not to mention the intellectual property you give away and will some day come back to haunt America. I am one of the mid level IT workers who was lied to to train my Indian replacement....I hope the whole thing backfires on corporate America in my lifetime....and to the Sr Management may your nights be filled with anxiety, stress and despair like mine...

POSTED BY: chris (October 08, 2008 08:21 PM)
Folks, this is an article written by a company that specializes in this type of outsourcing. This is an advertisement, not an article written with the best interests of the reader in mind. I agree with the previous poster. As a consultant, I see this all the time where a customer has outsourced to a large firm and is not happy. In practice, it is a lot harder to implement than it sounds. If organizations want to trim cost, find a good (and personally recommended) consultant or VAR in your area that specializes in helping companies save money. There are lots of things you can do: virtualize servers, implement a work-from-home program (this will help your employees save money too, and make them happier!), analyze your telco and cell phone contracts to see if you can save money there, and a lot more. Outsourcing has a place for specific projects and applications, but outsourcing your entire IT staff is generally a very bad idea. And if you an American, for the sake of your country, do not outsource to a company that uses overseas resources. We've lost enough jobs, do we need to lose more?

POSTED BY: Jon Frandsen (October 13, 2008 02:44 PM)
This is Jon Frandsen, the editor of the Kiplinger Recommends section. Material for this feature comes from a wide variety of sources, including white papers written by or sponsored by individual companies. While these papers clearly examine issues or problems related to their products or services, we do not select papers that promote a particular company or specific product. These papers often can be expected to argue for a particular approach -- and we select ones that we believe offer interesting ideas or serve as primers on complex subjects that may be useful to businesses. But our selecting an article is hopefully just the starting point. Hopefully readers will share their reactions, observations and own experience and knowledge to help other readers in making a sound decision.