Offshoring agony

We need statistics and commentary from analysts to reinforce the bleeding obvious because we seem quite capable of utterly ignoring it otherwise.

So I'm happy to note that a recent Gartner analysis of trends in Australian offshoring identified a lack of planning and a failure to consider hidden costs as the biggest barriers.

This comes as no great surprise, given that exactly the same problems occurred during the great governmental rush to outsource in the mid-1990s.

Agencies weren't given the option of finding the outsourcing deal that best suited their needs, or of keeping services in house if that was more efficient. Outsourcing was the only option, and the cross-agency deals tended to go to the lowest bidder, regardless of the long-term impact.

That kind of ideology made a mess of IT service delivery to government, and the same trend is evident in companies that decide to send services offshore without a careful and thorough analysis -- the "everyone else is doing it" mentality.

Even without needing to factor in consumer resentment at seeing services sent offshore, it's always been clear that an offshoring deal will ultimately prove more costly if there aren't well-defined parameters for the services involved and an efficient management structure to keep the deal going.

Ignore that and you might as well farm out your IT services to the mechanic down the road.