A Tale of Two Outsourcers (cont'd)

What We Learned From Our New Years Brunch
What our vigorous woman realized, and our haggard gentleman did not, is that outsourcing is not about abdicating responsibility. Outsourcing isn’t just a way to get rid of a problem, like throwing garbage over the fence into the next yard. Outsourcing, to the wise, is just a change in the way the operational environment is managed, not a means to avoid managing it.

Executives at companies that “get it” understand that their environments are stressed by success. Many carriers find themselves in situations where they can't scale to meet customer demand, and their functionality is outdated so they can't launch new generation services efficiently. Underneath it all, however, their business policies and procedures are often quite sound, but need a tune up and a move to a more modern platform. For some, outsourcing proves to be a cost-effective way of tackling roadblocks to growth without spending enormous amounts of capital and recruiting more people.

Other companies – like our fictional gentleman's - suffer from management ineptitude and poor leadership, among other problems. In some cases, systems have never been set up to deliver services in the way that marketing envisioned and as the customer operations team measured. They can't fulfill customer SLAs because their systems have never been configured to do so. When such companies outsource, they often fail to investigate and address their basic problems first. Instead, they take the fastest path available. The outsourcing partner is doomed to miss many critical, underlying issues because no one admits, understands or communicates what the real problems are. When problems aren't fixed, they stick around. Problems are like that.

It's not like outsourcing automatically means extra vacation, an easier job, and more free time at the squash courts. In fact, those that outsource successfully do so based on hard work up front that sets up the outsourcing partner to succeed. Stuffing problems in sack and throwing them over a wall to an outsourcer will simply return you to the fundamental theorem of IT – “garbage in, garbage out.” In the end, outsourcing should be about finding smart ways to improve the entire business, rather than finding fast ways to waste money blaming someone else for problems that aren't being fixed.

LTC International Inc. specializes in helping companies in the Telecommunications industry make more profits. We do that by bringing serious first hand experience to bear to align services and projects with business strategies and ensuring that measurable objectives are established for everyone to meet. We deliver results for Service Providers, Hardware and Software Vendors to Service Providers, and to investors. For more information, please visit our web site: www.ltcinternational.com

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