Louis Chua

Singapore

mobile consultant

Companies that are looking at outsourcing should understand exactly what they are outsourcing. Or they might just outsourced the core competencies and/or be held hostage by their outsource firm.

While advising different banks on their mobile initiatives, I noticed banks that had done outsourcing could not move as fast as banks with internal IT knowledge. e.g. They could not do scoping without scoping how much it cost to scope!

And cost-wise, one bank that had outsourced all its IT staff, found that its outsource firm is charging them 40 times what it cost another insourcing bank!

Basically, the joke going around was that every spelling error on their web site needs a change request that cost the bank 1k.

All the initial cost savings were 'recoup' by the outsource firm within a year.