On Outsourcing

About a year ago I took the opportunity to completely outsource my network function to a partner organization.

Why? Well to paraphrase the great Peter Drucker:

"...maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence."

Basically we weren't using our networking skills enough to keep it in-house and our network isn't large/complex enough to warrant a full-time headcount, so when we did make changes it took us a long time and the results could not be guaranteed, now I wouldn't say we were incompetent but I definitely would not go as far as saying we were networking experts either.

My deal on these kinds of situations is to take a cold hard look at what we are doing and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Does it add to our competitive advantage?
• Are we the best people to be doing this?
• Can this be done better by someone else?
• Does this process add value?

If you can't answer yes to all these questions then you should really take a look at outsourcing.