Cloud Computing, Outsourcing

The Swedish government is expecting the Swedish authorities to have a Sourcing strategy. Eventually I expect it will be a mandatory requirement of the Annual Report. From what I can hear there are not many examples of full scale outsourcing (Is there any one else than University of Utrecht that has completely outsourced their IT?). More common is partial outsourcing, using different vendors, and naturally these days: Use the cloud! (or Software as a Service)

So, what are the obstacles of outsourcing in general:

1. Competence
2. Price
3. Organizational issues
4. "Political" issues
5. Legal issues

I guess there can be more issues but these are a good starting point. So lets examine the five issues listed above.

First lets address competence, I am not always a thrilled buyer of consultants and external services. All too often the competence of the supplied consultants are too low, in short they are junior consultants sent to a costumer or they simply has no experience using the technology in a large organization. In any mature IT-organization, and especially at a university the general internal competence is rarely the biggest problem (often the opposite). Naturally there are good examples too, and I still nourish the hope.

When it comes to price it is important that outsourcing comes to the same price or less, it is hard to advocate outsourcing if the price is higher. It is naturally possible if the outsourced service is superior, however equal or slightly better is simply not good enough. In the case of Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@EDU the price is not the issue, since it is "free" for higher education. Thus the reason for continuing to use an internal service should be extremely good.

Organizational issues can consist of several aspects, one is the lack of experience the organization have when it comes to collaboration with external organizations, others are . The key here is likely to establish trust between the outsourcing partner and the internal organization. A part of this aspect I also add "we have tried this before and it didn't work", it is often lack of experience, or simply it was a while back and the reality has changed.

When it comes to "political" issues there can be several aspects, one is "a technical university should (must??) be able to handle X" (where X can be email or something else) or "if we outsource we loose work opportunities". And all these can be true, or false, in the end it is up to the university management to decide the policy in the sourcing strategy. This is naturally extra interesting when it comes to offshore outsourcing.

The legal issues seem to be handled easily by remembering to add country specific wording. In Sweden the handling of the Personal Data Act (Personuppgiftslagen 1998:204) and "the principle of public access to official documents" (Offentlighets- och sekretesslagen 2009:400 ) is two examples. But there are of course several other issues that needs to be addressed. In Sweden we always live with the public procurement laws.

This is likely the first post about outsourcing with the conclusion that outsourcing is possible and that most universities (it seems) is not very large buyers of outsourced services. This can or must change in the future.