Outsourcing What happens if an organization decides it doesn’t have the in-house expertise to support the system development process or any of the system maintenance required? No problem: outsource. There are hundreds of outside companies that will do the job. These companies offer expertise and experience, often at a lower cost than in-house staff. They can also offer smaller organizations economies of scale that make overall information processing cheaper. The total cost of ownership of a system can be cheaper because of outsourcing. Perhaps the outsourcing company can keep up with changing technologies better than the organization. It may simply be that the organization decides to spend in-house information resource dollars in other ways. Should you decide to use an outsourcing company to develop an information system, you must be more careful than ever to ensure that everything, right down to the smallest detail, is in writing and agreed upon by both sides. You are signing a contract with the outsourcer that carries the full force of law. You must agree on how changes will be made to the current system. How responsive will the outsourcer be to changing requirements? You still have some responsibilities for the system; what will they be? Get it in writing! You must continually analyze the outsourcing company’s performance and cost and make sure it remains the cheaper, better way to handle the organization’s At some point in time, you may find a different method is, in fact, cheaper. The table below provides information on the total cost of offshore outsourcing. Rapid Application Development for E-Business The supply of technical specialists is not enough to support the demand for new systems, or maintenance of the old ones. Something has to fill the gap—that’s why you see so many new methods already on the market and more advanced, easier-to-use tools coming down the road. The shortage of skilled technicians is also why you see more and more companies moving away from the structured methods we’ve reviewed. There just isn’t enough time. Rapid Application Development (RAD) reduces the time it takes to build systems by using many of the tools that we’ve discussed. You can choose from prototyping or fourth-generation tools to develop systems much more quickly. End users and techies can work hand-in-hand with joint application design (JAD) tools to reduce the development time for new applications. Modeling and Designing Systems
Outsourcing What happens if an organization decides it doesn’t have the in-house expertise to support the system development process or any of the system maintenance required? No problem: outsource. There are hundreds of outside companies that will do the job. These companies offer expertise and experience, often at a lower cost than in-house staff. They can also offer smaller organizations economies of scale that make overall information processing cheaper. The total cost of ownership of a system can be cheaper because of outsourcing. Perhaps the outsourcing company can keep up with changing technologies better than the organization. It may simply be that the organization decides to spend in-house information resource dollars in other ways. Should you decide to use an outsourcing company to develop an information system, you must be more careful than ever to ensure that everything, right down to the smallest detail, is in writing and agreed upon by both sides. You are signing a contract with the outsourcer that carries the full force of law. You must agree on how changes will be made to the current system. How responsive will the outsourcer be to changing requirements? You still have some responsibilities for the system; what will they be? Get it in writing! You must continually analyze the outsourcing company’s performance and cost and make sure it remains the cheaper, better way to handle the organization’s At some point in time, you may find a different method is, in fact, cheaper. The table below provides information on the total cost of offshore outsourcing. Rapid Application Development for E-Business The supply of technical specialists is not enough to support the demand for new systems, or maintenance of the old ones. Something has to fill the gap—that’s why you see so many new methods already on the market and more advanced, easier-to-use tools coming down the road. The shortage of skilled technicians is also why you see more and more companies moving away from the structured methods we’ve reviewed. There just isn’t enough time. Rapid Application Development (RAD) reduces the time it takes to build systems by using many of the tools that we’ve discussed. You can choose from prototyping or fourth-generation tools to develop systems much more quickly. End users and techies can work hand-in-hand with joint application design (JAD) tools to reduce the development time for new applications. Modeling and Designing Systems
Developing%20Information%20Systems%20Chapter%2011.docx