Have you ever known the outsourcing of IT Support/Services work?

[steinooo]

A tonne of us on here must work in IT, and numerous of us must have experienced outsourcing in some form or other.

Mainly outsourcing IT Support which looks to the Execs to be a great opportunity for a cost/FTE saving

However in 15 years in IT I've only ever known user dissatisfaction, reduced levels of support and an eventual swing back to in house.

What are your experiences?

 

[steinooo]

They can't have been that dissatisfied with me

I find there are the odd gems who work for MSPs, and it's great that they approached you directly.

I'm currently sitting at a private firm watching a new MSP take the money, whilst their basic incident and change processes are not well defined, so because the processes are bad/aren't defined at all/take ages to action, the users still walk up to the staff who were TUPEd to the MSP, because they are sitting in the same office, that's what they've always done and they don't care that they're breaking the rules. Depressing!

 

[steinooo]

Example came up today where a customer had an IT provider and then firewalls managed by their ISP. The contract for their IT support doesn’t have them managing the relationship with the ISP at all - so any internet/firewalling questions asked of the people who are meant to be in charge of IT get met with a “not our responsibility” answer.

You end up with simple things like a VPN tunnel config change or an ACL taking a day to complete and involving hours of conference calls. Which the end customer then receives bills from two companies for.

Just doesn’t make sense.

this example is what i've seen and just can't make sense of it. The customer ends up basically doing the work anyway but is being billed for it -

• there's no motivation from the customer to mould the outsourcers' processes as he knows he can just do it easily himself
• There's no motivation from the outsourcer to update their processes as they've signed the contract and are being paid

The crux of it is as mentioned in the contract phase, but in a complex job like IT not every eventuality and task can be costed and detailed in a contract so it's a loss for the customer and a win for the outsourcer.

I've seen arrogant customers outsource with such vague terms like "you just deal with everything infrastructure related" and no further terms. So when a new technology comes along which does things twice as quick and for half the price, the outsourcer doesn't have the motivation to implement such technology as they're being paid anyway.