Pressures Faced in it

Drawbacks of Outsourcing Maintenance

• Loss of control
• Loss of a learning source
• Loss of knowledge of the software
• Dependencies on the supplier
• Variations in the product quality
• Problems among personnel

Planning the Non-Plannable

• “Non-plannable” maintenance requires urgent corrective action
• It is the more problematic type of maintenance, due to its lack of planning possibility
• The use of predictive models are used to try to determine the quantity of resources needed for error corrections.

Benefits of Outsourcing

• Competitive Advantage
• Speed-To-Market
• Improved Quality
• Overcome cultural barriers to improving methods and processes
• Access to skills and resources

According to One CIO…

• "We see little value in offshoring legacy work," Ross says. "Next-generation applications is where the payoff's the greatest."

The Quality Question

• A large percentage of respondents rated the quality of work done by the offshore team as worse than in-house efforts
• 46% of respondents considered the work of the offshore teams to be of poor quality, and an additional 14% reported that their offshore team's work was "unusable or a setback to progress."

The Quality Question

• 51% of respondents reported that their current or most recently outsourced project was critical to daily operations
• Despite the reports of poor quality, 93% disclosed that their company plans to keep using their offshore vendor

Skill Sets for the New Worker

• Teamwork and communication skills remain important, but an understanding of other cultures and languages may also be helpful in this global economy
• More attention must be paid to large applications, standard tools and platforms that will be used by IT workers around the world, such as J2EE or .NET.
• In addition, a more global perspective should be taken

Generalized Application Packages

• There has been a growing trend towards the use of generalized application packages in IS development, largely due to the fact that in-house development has turned out to be costly and risky in terms of development costs and schedules and the quality of the resulting systems
• The impression is that there is a common-sense belief that application package based information systems are easier to implement than in-house developed systems
• It should be observed, however, that the results are not very conclusive in this respect

Questions?