Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a business practise or strategy where an organisation engages a third party or third parties to perform tasks and or services that were previously done in-house. 
This can involve anything from customer service / support functions as well as IT systems and / or support to accounting and marketing functions or campaigns, just about anything can be outsourced in the modern world. 
It can be beneficial for organisations to outsource as it can be more cost-effective and allow them to focus on their core competencies, or quicker to implement than an alternative, equally getting it wrong can result in increased operational costs, poor support or business function SLA’s and outcomes, delays and increased risk and complexity.

Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another, sometimes it involves RIF’s or layoffs.

Some benefits of Outsourcing:

• Increased efficiency and productivity.
• Reduced costs.
• Improved focus on core business activities.
• Access to specialised skills and expertise.
• Increased flexibility and scalability.
• Reduced risk of errors and delays. 

Some disadvantages of Outsourcing: 

• Decreased productivity.
• Increased costs.
• Increased process burden.
• Increased complexity, for example with data protection compliance.
• Potential for communication difficulties.
• Security and compliance concerns.
• Loss of in-house knowledge and control.
• Possible delays in task or project completion, especially for some simple tasks that could take minutes if not outsourced.
• Risk of quality issues if the provider doesn’t meet expectations.
• Potential for labour issues, either with transfer of staff or staff workplace satisfaction issues.  

A significant percentage of outsourced services and systems work really well and provide value for money and / or solve challenges organisation have, however, thats is not always the case.

Real world examples of some areas of general concern or issues with outsourcing are:

SLA related complaints for support issue / problem resolution: – users complain about service and getting problems resolved in a timely fashion often with repeated request / response ‘clarifications’, companies providing outsourced services often care more about stats, KPI’s and process, i.e. delivering against contract and getting paid. This is a really common complaint with IT Support and administration and very specifically firewall management outsourcing.

Lack of transparency and corruption: – the outsourcing manager within an organisation may have interests in or arrangements with the parties providing services. This includes nepotism and cronyism, most often though the lack of transparency is driven by incompetence, being responsible for an area they are not qualified for, or laziness or a combination of both.

Conflicts if interest: – an outsourcing company may be providing consulting services, reselling or recommending (with a non transparent interest) third party solutions and services and may be providing outsourced services to an organisation, it’s likely that if more than one of these is present from an external organisation that could be a conflict of interest, remember their priorities are not your priorities. These are very common issues, as service organisations try to increase the revenue yield from their customer base.

Leadership / management issues: – a leader decides to outsource as they have ‘management issues’ or ‘staff issues’ and it’s seen as the easy solution, indicators here are a lack of overall leadership, leaders with a knowledge deficit in specific areas, leadership decisions made without peer review and contracts agreed without a fair and competitive process. A clear set of objectives, costs, and metrics for measuring value against both must be part of any major outsourcing arrangement.

There are some typical contributing factors here: – The education vertical in general seems more prone to some of these issues, confusion between competence of delivering ICT or computer science in a teaching and learning environment and the completely different world of delivering ICT and ICT support to an academic environment.
Likewise academic or safeguarding leadership with responsibility for delivery of ICT services, but know real world experience of anything other than academia, clearly there has to be synergy with the support organisation..
These are some of the most common areas of leadership failure we see with respect to IT service and support delivery and IT service delivery as it relates to safeguarding against safeguarding objectives and outsourcing decisions.
It is also the case that sometimes the non technical leaders are mostly oblivious to the service gaps, technical jargon gaps and the reality of what people actually doing, everyone thinks it’s all working great & compliant with policies and desired outcomes, but the attention to detail is missing, no one is looking through the cracks where the safeguarding issues are likely to occur.

Along with a level of understanding of the organisational requirements, a level of contractual effort, due diligence and rigorous contractual review and consideration is necessary to prevent many of these types of issues occurring, this is often lacking is smaller / medium sized organisations, outsourcing contracts should be thoroughly reviewed by multiple parties within an organisation to ensure the issues above are avoided. A large percentage of organisations don’t even adequately read contracts, don’t insist on a data processing agreement where there should be one, or do not review it when one is given; in a lot of cases these contractual necessities are often inadequate, out of date or generally not fit for purpose.

With respect to outsourcing or co-sourcing, some areas are of particular incremental concern to organisations with safeguarding considerations are:

• Competence of the organisation providing the services or resources when related to safeguarding, including their staff compliance with background checks and other legal issues.
• Ability to have timely responses when there is an urgent requirement.
• Trust, Integrity & confidentially.
• Attention to detail, sometimes with a need for knowledge that may be more internal that external.
• Data Protection compliance.
• No one in the organisation has actually read the outsourcing or other contract properly, this is a very common is schools and academic trusts.

If an organisation outsources and it becomes problematic for end users, they are more motivated and included to find grey solutions to their problems, some examples in the IT area we have observed:

• Use of 4G / 5G via personal / corporate phone hotspots to bypass firewall configuration issues.
• Use of YouTube or other ‘free’ / social media resources instead of official video or other media resources.
• Use of personal productivity software / workspace accounts with Microsoft or google workspace to get around organisational controls.
• Use of department budgets or personal funding to acquire software or services outside of central provision to avoid controls / outsourcing issues.
• Use of personal accounts with ‘AI’ systems.

Our Products:

We provide consulting services and can assess issues with or beneficial opportunities to outsource, including all aspects of data protection legislation compliance and lawful AI use.