Internal and External Outsourcing Bids

I found an interesting blog from The Outsourcing Weblog. It discusses an article from InformationWeek about the dead Deutsche Post IT Outsourcing deal.

The wrap-up of the article is that Deutsche Post canceled an Outsourcing deal with HP before signing it, because they became aware of the performance push of the internal IT department. It seems the internal office was also invited to propose a bid, and the manager took it serious. When standing with the back to the wall and there is a chance to avoid outsourcing, the internal bid was close to the bid from HP.

Lacity/Willcocks describe in their book “Global Information Technology Outsourcing” a proven practise regarding internal bids:

“Organizations that invited both internal and external bids had a higher relative frequency of success than organizations that merely compared a few external bids to current IT performance (p. 163)”

Strangely, it is not very common that the internal IT department can submit a quote. It would be positive in different ways:

• The IT department has a reason why to optimize processes/costs. Without a reason you don’t get the backing from the Managers and from the workforce.
• Understand and define Interfaces: If a professional Outsourcing Partner gets the deal, the department made some thoughts already about the processes and interfaces.

WSJ article about Customer Satisfaction and Offshoring

Dr. Whitaker and his colleagues M.S. Krishnan and C. Fornell wrote a great paper. The article can be found on WSJ.

He and his team investigated how Offshoring affects Customer Satisfaction. The result is that Offshoring has an negative impact on Customer Service.

The result will be most probably negative, either you nearshore (domestic outsourcting) or offshore to low labor cost countries.

The full research paper can be downloaded here

Larry Dignan and Tom Steinert-Threlkeld featured this article as well in their “Between the lines” Blog on ZDNet:

Study: Offshore outsourcing dings customer satisfaction; Taking back office offshore ok by ZDNet’s Larry Dignan — A trio of professors working with the national Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan finds that offshore outsourcing hurts customer service ratings, but farming out back office operations has a limited impact. The working paper, conducted by the University of Michigan as well as Nasscom, India’s association of software and services companies, was penned [...]

Title of my diploma thesis

Offshoring of Telecom Services: How Offshoring effects flexibility and customer relationship.

• The vendors perspective between customer and offshoring opportunities.
• The dilemma of offshoring telecom services and the loss of flexibility towards your customer.
• How can this flexibility