Outsourcing IT Outsourcing in the Two Articles

Outsourcing

IT Outsourcing

In the two articles used for this analysis, the role of outsourcing as a means to gain greater cost advantages, greater time efficiencies through consolidating support and call centers of internal IT departments, and reduce customer service employee churn were the three major factors driving companies to outsource. Outsourcing is being used through financial services, banking, insurance and throughout manufacturing companies looking to reduce operating expenses and offload non-essential processes that take resources away from the core businesses of these companies. These are the motivations of the companies m mentioned in the two articles used for this analysis.

Analysis of Outsourcing

In the article titled IT: The Mother of all Outsourcing (Smith, 1997) the author presents examples of how IT outsourcing is giving a wide range of businesses the opportunity to streamline operations, reduce costs, increase time-to-market for new products, and also alleviate bottlenecks in ancillary businesses processes that had slowed down overall business processes. The goods and services being produced by companies in this example include banking firms, financial services and insurance companies, food retailers and manufacturers (Smith, 1997). The second article When to Outsource IT; Find the Right Mix of Internal and External Staff For Your Company (Morgan, 2007) the author provides a series of insights into how to best manage outsourcing as an overarching strategy to deliver business process improvement and streamlined IT operations. The author has written the article from the standpoint of a company evaluating outsourcing for the first time, with prescriptive points and insights provided for each step (Morgan, 2007).

In both articles the companies are choosing outsourcing to gain time-to-market advantages in their core businesses by offloading non-essential processes and tasks to outsourcing partners. The widely-held perception of outsourcing being primarily being used for cost reduction is not present in these studies; in fact the focus is more on time savings with accuracy and precision of process completion by outsourcing partners being far more important (Morgan, 2007) (Smith, 1997).

The organizations have benefited from outsourcing by concentrating on these dynamics of greater performance improvements and higher levels of accuracy over cost reduction alone. The article that profiles outsourcing across a wide variety of industries implies how a well-orchestrated strategy can deliver increased top-line revenue growth by minimizing the impact of interruptions from non-strategic tasks (Smith, 1997).