Staying the Course as a CIO: How to Overcome the Trials and Challenges of IT Leadership

CHAPTER 4 Obsessive Outsourcing Compulsion

“Do what you do best and outsource the rest.”

(Tom Peters)

If you ever start a debate about outsourcing with anyone in the IT industry, you will find it as inflammatory as a discussion about politics and religion, atop a petrol-soaked bonfire that has been liberally seeded with gas cylinders. Before long someone will show up with a match and it isn't hard to guess what happens next. After the explosion, soot-covered survivors will clamber through the wreckage of the office as earthquake and tsunami warnings are set off around the globe. Nearby supermarket shoppers will dodge between swaying, tottering shelves as cans of tinned milk and cat food rain down on them. Others in the vicinity will be frantically scanning the skies searching for a mushroom cloud. But those who have served their time in the IT industry will simply shrug their shoulders, sigh deeply and reflect quietly. There is more energy in a debate on outsourcing than there is in a kilogram of uranium.

The reason for all this passion is because outsourcing as a subject has more polarisation than a sunglasses factory. Vivid stories, exaggerated nightmare scenarios and dark suspicions of wrongdoing abound. Such tales are eagerly consumed in the halls, cubes and coffee stations of the hapless herds of prey, better known as the in-house IT department. For years, in-house IT organisations have quaked in fear at the prospect of being “out-sourced”. And they have good reason ...