Offshore dilemma: Should you send technical support work overseas?

Computerworld - IT managers have gotten very comfortable moving application development and maintenance to offshore providers. And offshore outsourcing of business processes, such as claims processing, is growing rapidly, too. But one area of outsourcing that hasn't caught on yet is offshore technical support for IT systems and infrastructure.

Simply put, the jobs of technical support personnel and systems administrators who work on real-time IT applications could be done remotely over a network connection to the system.

For example, if a problem arises with a CRM application, the troubleshooting and repair could be performed by workers in India. Server capacity management, network management and database and firewall administration are all functions that could be handled offshore.

But today, offshore support for production IT systems is a niche market, and because it's new, best practices haven't emerged. Users are cautious, given that this type of outsourcing involves access to mission-critical production systems and raises new concerns about issues such as security, privacy and intellectual property protection. Plus, once a company decides to shift its application and systems support to an overseas vendor, it will lose in-house expertise in those skills.

Infrastructure outsourcing is "a long-term decision — it's not easy to take it back," says G.K. Prasanna, who manages infrastructure services at Bangalore, India-based Wipro Ltd., a major overseas outsourcer.

Developing Best Practices

The financial services industry, which has been aggressive about using offshore IT services, recently began an effort through the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) in New York to develop a set of best practices for moving production and infrastructure support offshore.

Outsourcing application development is "fairly easy — there is no access into production systems," says Jim Salters, director of technology initiatives and project development at the FSTC. Faced with the new challenges of outsourcing technical support, the FSTC is developing an implementation playbook and hopes to have an initial version completed before the new year.

Stan Lepeak, an analyst at Meta Group Inc., says it's always a good idea for end users to band together to develop best practices, though he wonders how much information the competing financial services firms will be willing to share with one another.

Guidelines that make companies more comfortable with outsourcing technical support could help increase the use of offshore IT services. But the complexities uncovered by the FSTC's effort could also have the opposite effect and slow down the market. "It could lead them to the conclusion that this is a three- to five- to seven-year initiative" just to come up with the best practices, Lepeak says.

Standardizing Processes

Financial services firms are supporting the FSTC effort because without some kind of industry standards, "each bank ends up inventing their own processes," says an IT official at a major bank who asked not to be identified.