A funny thing happened on the way back to work....

Some of you may have caught my earlier blog post on the reasons why I choose Cisco equipment over everything else i.e. I can throw a brick out of the window and hit someone who knows it.

Well would you believe it? I threw a brick out my windows and hit.....well no not really but...

Here's the story I was driving back from my Cisco exam this morning and I was stopped to do a roadside census, I wound down my car window and the census taker asked me a few questions about my journey, he then spotted the CCNA book in my front seat and asked me how my Cisco studies were going!

I was a bit taken aback, I mean a census taker knowing about Cisco certifications! What are the odds? Last time I checked they weren't quite the "in" thing. He then told me he was a CCNA himself and he was working as a census taker while his visa got sorted out.

Life is funny like that!

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.