Now hiring: companies move away from outsourcing to control their IT destiny

[DainBramaged]

With all the talk about companies becoming more “agile” and outsourcing their IT operations to service providers, there's an interesting counter-trend starting to develop. While technology companies appear to be holding off on hiring because of economic fears, companies in sectors like healthcare and retail are moving to build their IT teams, in some cases reversing course on a strategy of outsourcing as much of their IT operations as possible.

Earlier this month, Best Buy announced that it would triple the size of the company's in-house IT staff by hiring 200 more tech professionals over the next year. Best Buy had largely outsourced IT operations, but the company's recently-hired CIO Jody Davis has reversed course. Davis told Retail Info System News, "We now want talent as Best Buy employees. We need to develop a strategy of what we're going to build. We like to take control of our destiny."

Yes, many companies have shed services like e-mail, data center operations, and even desktop support to managed service providers, and have moved toward hiring IT contractors to handle application development and maintenance tasks—opting to focus on their “differentiators” to be more competitive. But over the past year, competition for IT skills has become increasingly fierce, and many companies are realizing that IT isn't just a support service—it's core to their business' future. And to take control of that future, HR professionals and recruiters say, more companies are looking to lock in IT professionals with the golden handcuffs of statutory employment.


Dheeraj Bharadway, human resources vice president at Atlanta-based IT solutions provider NIIT Technologies, told Ars that more companies are building up their internal IT staff and insourcing projects because they're looking for a more reliable and predictable pool of talent. Having a stronger internal IT team to lead projects “drives a high percentage of predictability in success,” he said, because “dependability, understanding of organization in quick judgments and knowledge of where to tap for resources are big advantages.”

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/now-hiring-companies-move-away-from-outsourcing-to-control-their-it-destiny.ars

[msongs]

1. Dheeraj Bharadway evidently is sick of the crappy service provided from India lol nt

[DainBramaged]

3. That was the first thing I thought......maybe that's why the 20 or so who moved into my apartments

last year are all gone. I don't think any of them even spoke good English, let alone read it from the way they parked in the handicapped zones or fire zones whenever they felt like it.

[denverbill]

2. Dheeraj Bharadway. Can you say H1B with your best Atlanta drawl?

Kind of ironic, coming from an in-sourced likely H1B person.

That said, the article is good news.

[uponit7771]

5. Unnnn, he could be US born....insourcing began early 90s and picked up after that

[FarCenter]

7. In the early '90s, a gathering of the top HS students in the state was 1/3 South Asian

1/3 East Asian and 1/3 white approximately. There was a small number of blacks and Hispanics.

[uponit7771]

4. The last 5 contracts I've worked with was to move operations back on shore

[FarCenter]

6. Software development is being insourced, hardware is being outsourced

It's the shift to cloud computing.

[DainBramaged]

9. Somewhere in that cloud is hardware

And I convinced our people to stay with Terra-based hardware we own and control.

What happens when the Internet goes down (happens often) how do we access anything? Gigabyte switches are ALWAYS faster than the Internet, and there's NO loss at station one or 60.

[FarCenter]

10. How you do it depends on your business requirements

You can do your own cloud by collapsing data centers down to a few with a mix of private line, MPLS, and Internet connectivity between data centers, major locations, and smaller branch locations.

Or you can outsource the data centers to a hosting specialist, and there are a variety of those.

Or you can outsource PaaS or Saas for some application using a mix of Internet and MPLS or other private IP networking technology.

But to do this sucessfully means that you need to control the architecture and standards of your own software so that you can deploy it into a hardware and network infrastructure that is much more homogenous and standards based.

No more buying software applications that dictate running on server type X under operating system Y in a way that forces you to run data centers full of extremely inhomogeneous and idiosyncratic systems.

[DainBramaged]

11. I bought a Dell server, slapped 4-600GB Raptors in it, 1 main 1 for redundancy 2 for backup

and never have to worry about data storage again. Every Friday night myself or the Controller pulls one of the backup drives out and takes it with us in case of a catastrophe. We have 182GB of scanned documents going back 9 years as of today and we have virtualy instant access with the Reynolds EDM software.. We've been hit with the 100yr flood already this past August, we aren't going to let it happen again. We haven't forgotten to bring the drives back in the next Monday yet, and I doubt we will.

Cost a total of $3500 with Server 2008. All of our documents are scanned to it, our system runs off of it in conjunction with the Reynolds front end, and we batch the day's business to a DVD burner every night.


I see too many holes in the cloud, and we want possession of our business documents.

[Ruby the Liberal]

8. "Take control of our destiny" just doesn't resonate

No one outsources their strategic initiative decision making.

Sounds to me like this is more of an issue with time zone issues and employee/customer satisfaction than anything. I once worked for an employer who outsourced IT to India. While the help desk was 24/7, the Project teams were not, and (sorry to say), but I would rather put an icepick in my ear than have to deal with a culture that is raised to never say no (always rephrasing to be positive) whose English is barely understandable. That is very time consuming when you just need to get to the bottom line and get help with an issue.