To outsource or to not: What CIOs say?

BANGALORE, INDIA: When Kunwar Kishore Arora, the IT hotline at Airtel, threw open a packet of questions on infrastructure outsourcing, it set forth a deep and passionate flurry of queries and experiences from CIOs at C-Change.

Steering a panel on the topic, at C-Change 2011 here on Friday, Kishore elicited a lot of hands-on, eye-felt experiences from CIOs. When the question pops up around whether to outsource your IT brick-and-mortar to someone else or not, the answers can be really varied and full of a cross-section view and inclinations.

Some of the major ones turned to be as follows: SLAs, security, monitoring and management, what to look for in a service provider, their stability, their delivery standards, risk mitigation, switching between outsourcing partners, control, flexibility and control of the CIO, one-throat-to-choke Vs many vendors passing the buck around, etc.

Apart from panelists like Sathiavageeswaran, Head-IS, HPCL; Shirish Godbole, president-IT, Suzlon, other CIOs cross-pollinated and whirled up some important questions that haunt an outsourcing decision even in the face of new infrastructure management tools around.

While they admitted to benefits like cost-efficiency, access to better skills, performance; doubts still abound.

Should I outsource or insource? What are the legal loopholes? Should I go for one vendor or many vendors? Would I lose control? Can I depend on my service providers to not give me a crisis-downtime spot during a peak hour? What is the best way to ensure SLAs - penalties or premiums?

Some conclusive tips got a common nod from most CIOs. Like — always document your exit well, no matter how promising the idea seems at the beginning, as no application is going to sustain a 3- or 5-year window, even if the service provider does not disappoint you.

Make sure the equation between people and tools for delivering the outsourcing goals is well-balanced at the service provider’s side.

Preceding this panel was a thought-provoking panel by Prasanto Kumar Roy, chief editor and president-ICT, CyberMedia Group, on greening of infrastructure.

In the session he emphasized that IT does not have to be for its own sake in a green connotation. One can look beyond IT for doing this. He gave examples of some low-hanging fruits like paperless offices, server and desktop virtualizations, CRT bulb replacements etc.

“It requires a lot of CIO’s time and attention to handle IT in the right way. There are no CGOs (chief green officers) here.” Energy efficiency improvements have more touch points than we can see.