IT roller coaster: Insource — Outsource — Insource again

“We need to increase our contribution to Company’s success and get rid of legacy systems”.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And the aim is fair, but what follows not always looks so festive…

Many IT companies face with necessity to cut off the dead wood and replace old components of their IT ecosystem with something new, effective and scalable. And something “a la mode” just a bit)))

Then the question pops in: what to do with all those guys who were focused on development and maintenance of those systems, services and infrastructure elements for years? New solutions we chose are being heavily supported by vendors or big consulting companies and they are hosted in Clouds… Moreover, those external guys are competing with each other and propose more and more flexible service tiers and 24x7 support… And this may become a moment of saying good buys to those who were working in company for years and know much about it. As a result more and more critical processes and needs are covered with solutions where all the expertise lays outside of the organization.

After honeymoon with outsourcing concept hang over often comes. As any good trend, delegating IT to outsource might cause “the more the better” mindset shift in heads of a management. However, if you push too hard, something unwanted could happen;)

One day leadership team could find out that not having dedicated resources inside the organization may cause a business disruption since your external guys always come and go with no solid guarantee that successor would get all the knowledge of his former colleague and, which is worse, that process is not being controlled by you. Or, for instance, external specialists are being shared with other clients and they can’t react that quickly to your needs and their responses may become more formal than useful… Also external guys may not be sitting in your office and they have no good contact with your business stakeholders who simply don’t know where to go with their problems. Oh! And don’t forget about TCO growth — outsource resources are not that cheap as they might have been perceived at the beginning! Many things may happen if you put all eggs in one basket.

The pendulum swings back and the need for in-house expertise becomes apparent yet again. This is what CIO journal says about that (https://www.cio.com/article/272007/staff-management-the-new-it-department-the-top-three-positions-you-need.html):

"Hiring was hot in the fin de siecle 1990s, as CIOs threw money around trying to find and retain top technical talent. But as the new millennium wore on, hiring fizzled, and CIO pressured to cut costs and do more with less — outsourced much IT work and even fired employees.

Now CIOs are staffing up again"

This loop plays over and over again and shapes quite an environment in IT department. People are tired of constantly changing organization, goals and technology kaleidoscope. Knowledge sharing becomes one of the most critical skills within the team since new faces are a constant and farewells, a given.

Knowledge transition and documenting are not that easy as it may seems and require clear vision of the outcomes, skills of business analysis and excellent communication.

Here are some practical recommendations which proved themselves as extremely helpful for me and my colleagues:

Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if they appear to be trivial. Concept of common sense is overestimated: what could be common sense for one person, for another might be terra incognita.
Be proactive with people on outsourcing, they’re often exist in their professional context for a long time and might not even suspect that there are things they do which nobody knows of or they could be reluctant to share knowledge with you not willing to loose their position of influencer.
Always be patient and respectful. It’s not easy during knowledge sharing, I know;))