IT outsourcing has long been demonstrated to be a prosperous strategy and its significance has only increased with time.
In these days of recession, businesses are more than ever trying to find ways to reduce their expenses; one of the best ways to achieve these targets is to go for outsourcing.
While you can outsource a number of tasks from HR to merchandising to helpdesk support, the actual opportunity rests in outsourcing IT work as a good number of IT professionals reside in nations like India where hourly rates are too low.
A Canadian corporation organization outsourcing debt recovery to an offshore Indian call center would face troubles as the staff might not be that effective because of their second-rate English comprehension skills.
Likewise, you have to comprehend potential customers' psychology and reasoning to do successful promotion, and you can hardly anticipate your Indian service providers to grasp how people think.
But IT work like software development and graphic designing can definitely be outsourced without upsetting yourself about these factors.
I don't mean to say there aren't any risks involved here; only that you can profit significantly though the risks are relatively negligible, specially if you do it the right way.
Let's quickly skim through some of the common advantages you can gain if you choose to subcontract IT projects.
The most talked-about advantage, needless to say, is none other than the opportunity to save a good deal of money.
In comparison with internal staff, an outsourcing firm won't get the typical benefits on your account like conference tickets, paid holidays, etc.
So your total expenses related to employees are bound to go down.
And after all, you can avoid heavy taxes too even if the BPO company includes that in the invoice, simply because taxes in third world countries are way low as compared to Europe.
Moreover, the actual advantage of IT outsourcing, in my opinion, is the opportunity to devote attention wholly on your central competencies without having to worry about other side-line tasks.
All your secondary tasks are areas where you typically lack expertise and experience, so doing them in-house would mean a couple months or maybe years before you're able to eliminate inefficiencies.
On the other hand, IT outsourcing companies would have been taking such jobs for many years and must have arrived at that efficiency level where you cannot jump immediately.
So rather than making the wheel again, you can be at advantage by hiring professionals who keep themselves updated with market trends and know the newest technologies like the back of their hands.
Another commonly neglected advantage of outsourcing is peace of mind from staff selection and retention.
If you are a small enterprise that is low on the budget, employee recruitment can mean distracting your mind from your main competencies for a couple days at least.
And it becomes a double blow if the worker leaves your organization and joins your competitor, taking several company secrets and competitive expertise, and calling for a new tiresome hiring process.
Hence, outsourcing IT work is a pretty sensible strategy and can bring about several advantages you rarely think about.