My role at work (and often my contributions in life) seem to comprise a collection of things. They are part:
- Entrepreneur
- Business analyst
- IT guy
- Enterprise architect
- Business process modeler and
- Project manager
Considering the business process side of it today gave me some cause to ponder.
I also happened to be reading about outsourcing vs. "insourcing", or bringing a process back into the organization and how, like marital divorce, doing so can often be more costly (time, money, effort) than what it took to outsource it originally. This, the article pointed out, is particularly true if the impetus for outsourcing in the first place was driven at least in part by a wish to divest the company of whatever headaches the process had been causing in the first place.
When I was at EarthLink back in the 90s and we had been experiencing the peak of our outrageous growth as a company, there was a point where we were considering outsourcing our shipping department and some other administrative functions possibly. (We weren't "offshoring" mind, you, just outsourcing it to another company.) The concept of letting someone else do the stuff you didn't want to, now known as "outsourcing", was relatively new, at least to us.
It was an interesting idea. Not only would the outsourcer take on all our shipping migraines, but they'd even absorb some of the staff (subject to the interview gauntlet and approvals) so that we didn't feel so guilty about displacing people.
It occurred to me then, and even more now, that one reason we were thinking about this shift at all was we didn't particularly enjoy the subject of shipping. To use corporate-speak, it also wasn't our "core competency".
Does this warrant handing a process over to another company and abdicating responsibility for it? What if the new handler, the outsourcer, does a poor job of managing the shipping processes and we have to bring it back in? Wouldn't we really behind the 8-ball then?
In other words, everything we do in life and at work is a process or
series of processes and flows. Each process has to be streamlined and
dovetail with its sibling and cousin processes. When they do, peace
reigns. When they don't, it seems concepts like "outsourcing" start surfacing more quickly.
What I concluded after the article and some considering of my own was this: the processes of a company have to be identified in two-dimensional form (otherwise how can you say you know what they are) and must be faced sooner or later. One may as well iron the thing out while it is within one's control and then see if there are betters ways to manage it which result in cost savings, whether that be insourced, outsourced, on-shore, near-shore or off-shore. (How's THAT for corporate-speak?)
Another way to put this could be as a policy: never outsource a process on the basis of "this thing is driving me nuts" without first looking at and thoroughly analyzing the process(es) oneself.
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