Augmentation, CMMI and Outsourcing

 

Augmentation of resources is all about helping a business to identify its needs and fulfilling them. 

Outsourcing is, from a government employee’s viewpoint, a bad thing, but obviously wont affect us. Ok, so we might get some contractors in but that’s not the same thing, after all we get knowledge transfer when that happens, don’t we? 

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) sounds just like the sort of approach our organisation needs to use if we want to measure ourselves and our first thoughts were that we had nothing to worry about. After all it’s not a process in itself, it just describes the characteristics of effective processes. 

We didn’t spot the immediate connection between any of the above, until we did some more investigation: 

Resource Augmentation 

The usual argument made by most firms offering this service, is that the IT department in many companies find that, even when only using internal staff, responding to constantly changing technology needs and initiatives can be very challenging (translate this to mean difficult). These companies then claim that they will give you the ability to deliver technical resources to your organization quickly and efficiently by giving you access to highly trained IT staff. This gives you the flexibility to tackle your day-to-day challenges (which if you are an IT department is your day-to-day job) without the expense, delay, or inconvenience of a lengthy recruitment and assessment processes. 

Of course if all this sounds like outsourcing then we are sure that it is a coincidence.

CMMI

The selling point of CMMI is that if you insist that the people you are dealing with have reached a certain maturity level, then it is beholden to your organization to be on, or above that level, as it means that their processes will fit in with yours. This makes perfect sense if you are looking to do business with another company; it makes even more sense if you wanted to hand over a large package of work. If all your processes are nicely documented and proven to work, how easy would it be for a similar organisation to carry out your work? 

Outsourcing 

Lets be honest, the Land Registry doesn’t have a good track record as an early adopter of new ideas and all the indications are that outsourcing is on it’s way out just as we are thinking of utilizing it. In a recent U.S. survey 9% of those who use onshore services - outsourcing conducted within the U.S. - and 8% of those who turned to offshore outsourcing services said they plan to cut back on outsourcing this year. 

Nissan North America, one of the great exponents of outsourcing, is reversing the whole process. Times have changed, and so has Nissan's IT management strategy. They are taking back much of the work outsourced to IBM in 1999 as part of a contract that at the time was valued at $1 billion over nine years. 

They argue that bringing IT functions such as business analysis, program management, and application and infrastructure architecture planning back in-house should help the company better align its technology with business needs. 

The bottom line 

If jobs go outside will they return? 

If they were to return would you still be working here? 

The Government is intent on reducing the size of the Civil Service; outsourcing provides it with such an opportunity. The Government wants to reduce the pension bill and not employing the staff directly would go a long way to achieving this. 

The only question left, is what’s in it for us?