Is your boss working to outsource his own job?
Posted by Ian Holsman
All too often we hear about IT being a cost center, and how our IT should be cheaper.
They point at google, or try to benchmark themselves against ‘best practices’ and try to emulate them.
In my experience what this usually end up as is: do your existing job, but faster or cheaper.
So.. how do people in the trenches normally respond?
They try their hardest to do it.
what normally results is:
- policies which people enforce blindly
- bug queues
- deployment meetings
managers are happy, they have measurements, they have KPI’s, they have charts. and if they do their job properly they are running cheaper than before… everyone’s happy..
but not the end users, while they don’t have any metrics or charts to proove this.. they feel that their level of service has decreased and become lower value than before… but they don’t complain as the metrics show otherwise.. IT has become more efficent.
so.. it comes budget time, and the bean counters say I just read in the latest magazine that Textdrive/google/whoever has a widget-to-dongle ratio of 50, and ours is only 30..
how can we compete with a widget-to-dongle ratio of 30? no wonder we are losing money/not earning 80% ROIC etc. etc.
so the manager gets his metric targets and the cycle continues.
and after 1-2 years an IT operation centre with better than average efficency ratings.. BUT
You have also made yourself a perfect target for being outsourced. you have delegated all your customer interactions to a web page
If they are lucky a phone call from a admin they have never seen before asking them about bug #12321 they raised 2 months ago, and if they still want to do it, as it was using widget 2.0 while the standard is now widget 3.7.
but the bean counters are looking at a job-shop outsourced from india/cyprus/china which have a widget-to-dongle ratio of 70… more than double their IT internal ratio.. and it’s not like anyone ‘likes’ dealing with our internal IT shop anyway..
(sound familiar?)
so.. as a IT manager it is your job not to let this happen. don’t forget the human aspect of IT operations, while joe down in marketing has the intellectual capacity to fill in a bug-form, and might even know what version of widget he is running.. don’t make him remember it.. call him, talk to him and let your staff fill in the bug form, not the end-user.
Make the first point of interaction a semi-friendly voice. Work on your branding.. make the first word that people think of when they hear ‘IT’ is helpful. make your IT people know the language/processes that they are inovlved in. why do marketing need the widget in the first place?
So when the outsourcing company rings your exec and says we have a widget-to-dongle ratio double what your currently getting he will brush them off as they couldn’t possibly have the value that internal IT brings.
So to summarize.. differentiate yourselves from the job-shops.. immerse yourselves inside the business units so that you are one of them. Go the ‘high value/high cost’ route, not the ‘low value/low cost’ one, and you might still have a job in 2 years time.