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September 14, 2007 — CIO — It is striking how most everyone will insist that communication is a key activity to successful outsourcing. So why the heck can it be so darn hard to make people within an organization understand what is going on? And why is it so hard to have clear-cut communication between the outsourcer and the outsourced?
The reason to outsource is mainly to cut costs and thus improve the bottom line. Consequently, efficient communication becomes second priority and far too often gets lost somewhere along the way. However, focusing on IT costs alone will not make a difference to the IT organization unless there is an actual understanding of what is going on. Sure, any project manager will know the importance of communicating so that expectations will—at least in theory—match the deliverables. And even if the project managers do it all by the book, it is still often a limited audience that gets the information.
As an example, on one outsourcing contract it turned out that the dedicated intranet was read each month by only 10 percent of the employees. With such a poor hit rate, it does not matter how much effort is put into the intranet. If it is not read, it is useless.
Key elements to overcoming some of the communication obstacles, and therefore improving the overall perception of a global outsourcing agreement, include:
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Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.
Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.