Outsourcing: the easy way out?

• Author: Swindon, Gary

This article first appeared in the March 1998 issue of civic.com and is reprinted here with permission. Civic.com is a publication of FCW Government Technology Group, an IDG company.

The only activity of consequence in a public-sector chief information officer's (CIO) or senior information technology manager's professional life, I believe, is making the right infrastructure decision.

Senior managers in very large jurisdictions - such as major federal agencies and the 10 or so largest states and counties, such as Los Angeles and Wayne County, Michigan - are under enormous pressure to produce results that save large sums of money, speed up service delivery, and vastly improve government business processes. If that were not enough, they face the daunting challenge of actually carrying out the vision behind their infrastructure decisions and taking responsibility for the impact of those decisions in the long run.

Unfortunately, one consequence of having to deal with monolithic problems is that CIOs sometimes start looking for an easy way out. The result is often a solution that is itself monolithic in nature and that turns for answers to the major IT industry trends of the last five years - client/server computing, the Internet and intranets, network computers (or was that networked computing?) and the privatization and outsourcing movement in its various forms. Considering the mixed successes of each of these technologies, one wonders whether a simple monolithic solution to a complex problem is indeed too good to be true.

Of all the trends noted above, the most insidious has been outsourcing - that is, the simple act of giving your troubles to someone else so you will not be bothered by them any more. Current examples are not hard to find, including California's decision to outsource its networks and Pennsylvania's intention to outsource its data centers. But top honors must go to Connecticut, which is attempting to give all its IT functions to some lucky vendor. While many states are larger, none had previously stepped up to outsource everything.

On balance, it seems likely that if "sticker shock" doesn't get them, then the challenge of putting everything into the vendor community's hands probably will.

Perhaps the most basic question raised by these cases...