What is it about?

IT work is often outsourced to service providing companies. This is done for short-term financial reasons. However, the risk of doing this may be underestimated by companies. This first-hand account by an IT professional being 'outsourced' and an introduction to provide context highlight these risks.

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Why is it important?

IT failures are increasingly hitting large companies that have outsourced the support of their IT capabilities, and thereby their competitiveness or capability to function at all in the modern world. This paper cuts through the managerial rhetoric to highlight the need to retain staff who have developed their IT skills slowly over time by working on specific complex organizational IT systems.

Perspectives

It would be easy to dismiss Frankie Woods' heartfelt account as just one person's viewpoint. But it represents the uncertainty of many professional workers facing outsourcing of their jobs to a cheaper resource. Frankie knows it is about money but also knows that managers are mistaken in their assumption that a lower paid worker without experience of working on the system can do the same work to the same quality.

Dr Clive R Trusson
Loughborough University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: ‘An end to the job as we know it’: how an IT professional has experienced the uncertainty of IT outsourcing, Work Employment and Society, August 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0950017016656320.
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