Mike Altendorf argues email management should be outsourced

You have to pity the Tony Hayward, CEO of BP. As Stefan Stern points out in a recent article for the FT he has just been taught a terrible lesson in the perils of outsourcing. Watching him standing on the shoreline with that rather desperate expression on his face I imagine him to be reliving that fateful conversation in which he was convinced that letting someone else handle rig operation and maintenance would be good for ‘efficiency’ and ‘cost reduction’. The bright spark who came up with that idea has probably long gone… what a legacy to leave behind.

Not that there is anything wrong with outsourcing. But if it could lead to a 30 per cent reduction in your share price then you need to think long and hard about it.

Essentially there are two forms of outsourcing. Firstly, there is the non-business critical support functions - relatively low risk and often less need for the business to retain control. Secondly, there is outsourcing that which is too difficult or costly to do in-house. It’s in the latter that the danger lies because all too often outsourcing equals loss of control and when that happens your ability to respond should something go wrong is – as Mr Hayward is now all too aware – severely impaired.

When it comes to IT the rules are no different. Plus now you have the cloud in play. With many of the models currently out there cloud IS outsourcing and don’t be fooled – the risks are exactly the same. There is no doubting however that service levels have improved and service providers of all flavours now understand better the difference between providing a solution and providing a service. This means that some business critical services can be more safely outsourced to (as the old saying goes) ‘reduce cost and improve efficiency’.

Take email for example. Critical? Yes. Complex? Not really. A decent email management provider will probably improve reliability, security and up time and if the worst comes to the worse there are always back-up solutions like Google and Hotmail (and picking up the phone from time to time never hurt anyone – in fact its probably something we should all do a little more often). 

Email is effectively a utility these days and this can be said for a growing number of IT services. They now fall into the first category of what can be outsourced. To use the old analogy, you wouldn’t want to provide your own gas and electricity. However there are also a growing number of services that are actually increasing in complexity and, as the way we access technology and interact with it becomes more complex, finding the correct provisioning model is difficult.