Selling outsourcing

IF HAMLET HAD been a CTO, his famous monologue might have begun, "To outsource or not to outsource?" One of the greatest challenges for CTOs is where to draw the line between insourcing and outsourcing -- you can't get the job done by completely going either way.

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Personally, I have seen enough outsourcing disasters to have developed a distaste for outsourcing in general, but my views are changing as new outsourcers such as Centerbeam are emerging with innovative technology-based services, for example, not just, "we will bring new people in to do what your people were already doing."

Recently I made a decision to outsource most of the functions of InfoWorld's IS department to Centerbeam after an exhaustive analysis of our business needs and budget levels. These kinds of decisions can be grueling on a personal level because jobs can be affected, but there were a couple of undeniable factors in my decision as I looked internally at InfoWorld and externally at changes in the technology and business environments that made this decision virtually inevitable.

Business is an every-day, around-the-clock commitment for many companies -- whether they admit it or not. As any IT manager knows, "official" support hours might be 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., but the real workday spans from the time the first employee logs in until the last employee logs out. Pagers, cell phones, wireless devices, VPNs, and high-speed network connectivity into home offices mean that any employee can work effectively at almost any time (whether or not this is a good thing is a subject for another column -- as CTO, I just have to support it). If your company is on the West Coast like us, an early riser on the East Coast might wake up and check email at 3 a.m. local time or earlier. An aggressive salesperson on the West Coast might be working on a critical presentation for a breakfast meeting until midnight local time -- or later.

Although InfoWorld employees don't keep these hours regularly, when they do, the work they are doing is critical. As you might expect, InfoWorld does not have the budget to have a "live" person available spanning the more than 20-hour window I describe above, so I had to either look for other options, overwork my existing staff, or tell my CEO that we need to slow the business down to accommodate our limited ability to offer consistent IT services. (For those of you out there aspiring to be CTOs, that last option is what is known in the business as a "career-limiting move.") Centerbeam's solution offered me around-the-clock IT services supported by a refreshingly clear, concise SLA (service-level agreement), with no fine print.

The "virtual office" is very real, creating new support challenges. The staff at InfoWorld consists of approximately 130 employees spread among our headquarters, branch offices, and home offices -- about 25 geographic locations in all. Most of the distributed staff are engaged in our two most critical functions: the production of high-quality editorial content, performed by our editorial staff, and the selling of services to our advertisers and readers, undertaken by our sales staff to generate the revenue we need to produce our editorial content. Providing second-class IT support to these key end-users hurts our core business, plain and simple. I needed an always-on, customer-focused, and quality-focused "virtual help desk" to give these users the level of support they need and deserve. Centerbeam's solution fit the bill.

Whereas this column deals with the basics of my decision to go with Centerbeam, look for a column in the near future describing its innovative service in more detail and how the actual implementation is going for InfoWorld. In other words, I will show you how reality ultimately matched up to the theory behind the decision. Stay tuned.