Chapter 4
Outsourcing

Outsourcing or sub-contracting work relating to the creation and development of your Intranet can of course be sought at any stage of its evolution. Unfortunately, external consultants or sub-contracting agencies rarely come cheap. Therefore, it is better to recognise at the beginning, especially at the costing phase, as to what services or expertise the organisation has at its disposal and to assess realistically what expertise it is lacking. Attention at this stage should be given to the word ‘disposal’. A sponsor or equivalent may have asserted that SQL programming expertise is required (perhaps for integrating legacy databases with a web-browser front-end), then identified a programmer or team of programmers and assumed they will be available for this purpose, without consulting the unsuspecting department or employee. To some it may seem a little unrealistic that a project could be initiated without taking into consideration these kinds of issues. However, due to the way Intranets can be readily implemented and apparently appear inexpensive to set-up, there is still a misconception that many duties and remits relating to the Intranet can be simply subsumed by existing service departments and their respective members of staff.

Even where there is a valid argument that some processes, for instance publishing, will become less work-intensive and therefore free-up time for the employee, there will still be a period of transition whilst the new process replaces the old. This can, in effect, increase the workload of many employees involved in the initiative.

Where resources may first appear to be available for Intranet development, on closer inspection those areas such as IT support may already be overstretched to capacity. Therefore this expertise will need to be sought elsewhere.

Hence the need for a complex financial business plan. Buying in expertise at the very beginning, purely to provide feasibility costings in terms of software needs and human resources, may pay significant dividends in the long run and help avoid unnecessary comprises and embarrassment caused by the underestimation of future costs.

So how can outsourcing help?

First off, unless your staff members have designed an Intranet before, it is unlikely you will have the in-house experience to develop an Intranet. This becomes even more apparent particularly when considering that the implementation of an Intranet requires a wide range of practitioners including project managers, graphic designers, network and security specialists, database specialists, knowledge and information managers and marketing professionals, to name but a few. In contrast a reputable consultancy firm will have built up a stock of such expertise and related associates and may often have applied this knowledge several times over. A consultancy may therefore be able to help you to address and answer the following issues surrounding Intranet development:

• Aims & objectives - what is its purpose?
• Design - what will it look like?
• Processes - how will content be developed and maintained?
• Standards - how will content be managed?
• Technology - what hardware and software is needed and what can you afford?
• ROI - how can you measure Return On Investment?

Different consultancies offer different levels of expertise. This is reflected in the services they offer and not surprisingly in the arguments they provide as to why you should listen to them and not to other consultancies and their advice. At the most basic there are one or two-person bands which will act as a broker to work in your ‘best interest’ in deciding what areas of expertise you should buy in and why. At the opposite end of this extreme is the sub-contracted agency, which will design, build and take on the overall responsibility of managing your Intranet. Such players include the likes of IBM and Cap Gemini.

In-between these two extremes, the likes of TMS Consulting exist who offer support from conception to implementation (TMS Consulting, 2000). Their design and development methodology prescribed to customer organisations consists of the following stages in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Staged methodology for Intranet implementation

Tips sourced elsewhere that claim to help in the process of successful outsourcing, include (Warren, 2000):

DO:

• Think about how long you want the agreement to last; longer deals will be less expensive but you will lose flexibility
• Group services together logically when selecting outsourcing and avoid creating areas where different outsourcers have joint responsibility
• Develop an in-house team with the right skills and enough resources for renegotiations of service level agreements and implementing changes
• Include the people who will manage the contract on a day-to-day basis in contract negotiations - to help minimise the risk of committing to something unrealistic
• Get professional legal advice
• Raise potential service issues early before they become critical

DON’T

• Outsource a problem area
• Skimp on the resources required during the transition period and on an ongoing basis to manage the contract
• Keep staff in the dark about the deal and what will happen to them
• Allow the boundaries of the contract to creep - make sure the contract scope is tightly defined
• Allow purchasing specialist involved in contract negotiations to push you into a cost-reduction deal at the expense of original objectives such as improved service levels

Anyone doubting the market interest in Intranet consultancy services may be interested in a recent report by Datamonitor. The report claims that the European Intranet services market that was valued at $728 million in 1999, is set to rise to over $1.5 billion in 2003.

Datamonitor consultant Philip Codling comments:

So who are the players driving this market?

In the Intranet services field traditional IT service providers such as Cap Gemini and PricewaterhouseCoopers are now competing head-on with major telecommunication companies like BT.

On the whole Datamonitor claim that the following market sectors (figure 3) are all vying for a piece of the substantial pickings that the Intranet services market is predicted to offer:

Figure 3. Converging ICT market sectors and Intranet service providers