It was a hard choice to make when IT firms found it was essential to share information (and sometime a whole network) through the web to reach more customers and more corporations around the world. The choice to make was weather to stay in the fortress of security guarded by countable soldiers (computer security experts) or to open all their gates without enough back up soldiers.
It was outsourcing that gave them a third option and a new hope. Now they are able to hire more experts to ensure their networks are secure.
The best feature of outsourcing is what’s described by ‘actions, not words’. You can find many managers talking in meetings or conferences about how they did this and how they saved that. While actually a good manager, and consequently a good company, is the one focusing more on what number, markets and customers has to say. Hence, they can make better and balder decisions among which is outsourcing and offshoring.
So it’s not surprising to know how much money and time these companies saved, the thing which enabled them to focus more on the core and strategies.
Even more up-to-date companies are going with the global trend of specialization by outsourcing more specialized tasks than others. The very famous example is SEO as a part of web applications, the experts of which are highly required nowadays beside the mother category experts.
If you want to outsource something, it has to have one/all of these characters:
- Complicity (like tasks dealing with many formulae or details).
- Importance (like tasks that are important yet very time consuming).
- Unpopular (like tasks that you simply don’t want to do!).
As you can outsource secretarial tasks or transcription requests, you can outsource your web security needs! It’s something like hiring a security guard to a building, you can be healthy enough to fight for your apartment in case someone attacks at night, but you need to sleep in order to be able to do a more fundamental task in your life at the morning, i.e. earning your living!
There are many countries ’specialized’ in outsourcing like India, Russia and China. Considering India as an example (as it was on top of these countries according to a report released in January 2007 and again on 2008) we can summarize the expected benefits as follows:
- India’s major investment today is IT.
- There are a lot of skilled persons and talents waiting for a chance.
- Most of the service, if not all, are less expensive.
- Many offers to outsourcing countries are given by many competing Indians suppliers.
- Many companies have gained experience in management and discipline.
- Ability to do more tasks in less time.
- Ability to work with the available resources.
- IT development grows at a steady pace.
In general, part of your outsourcing success is to choose the right partner offshore. That’s an even harder decision to make than considering outsourcing in the first place because you have to make a choice that relieves part of your stress and gives you and your in-house employees some extra time to work on the project in hand. If you succeed in this, all partners including you, your in-house’s and outsourced will be winners, whether on the personal level (as each person will focus on a specific small task) or the team level.
What’s harder than reaching success is to maintain it. So you shouldn’t keep outsourcing out of your mind in case you are already managing a successful firm simply because you want to maintain that success. Such maintenance needs you to focus even more than you used to while your project was still growing.
In both cases, whether you are targeting success or maintaining it, you have to do some calculations for the costs and benefits of outsourcing in your case before you start finding a vendor or signing contracts. That’s in order not to find yourself in another trap of financial or time management. A thing which will consume your attention and thus makes the whole outsourcing in vain.
And even if that’s not the first time you use the outsourcing solution, you should do these considerations before each time you start a new project because even if they seem similar and carbon copied, projects can differ widely when you reconsider them.
Another important thing to consider when choosing a partner is the ability and means to contact him at any time when needed. Whether you use the web, phones, faxes you have to ensure the other partner is fully oriented with this means of communication. Some projects might need video conferencing tools, so make sure you have them!