It must be that time of year again when all the CTO’s in the US and UK have just arrived home from their yearly off-site where they discuss their golfing scores, new purchased yachts and the usual annual announcement of either off-shoring or outsourcing IT resource. Some call me cynical, but I have been in the IT business for too long not to notice the trends and patterns. These patterns are most pronounced either just as summer begins (so around now in the UK) or upon the arrival of a new CTO. At these pronounced moments in any industry, remembering that the CTO usually can not produce money for the business (unless a software house), so the normal and obvious pattern is to save vast amounts of money and therefore earn the exaggerated bonus either leveraged from this or contractually bound to them. So, just as summer kicks in and business starts to take its sunny day lull, we hear the trumpets blast as the latest IT trend hits the IT management team. All technologists hold their breath in anticipation of the latest announcement, waiting to find out if this year’s initiative will be off-shoring or outsourcing to save bundles of cash.

I don’t really have any issue with anyone making the decision to outsource or use remote resources to save money. After all I am a director of nrlcomputers and that’s pretty much what they do. I do however scoff at the CTO that looks to save the most amount of money via off-shoring with little knowledge or consideration into how the service levels will drop. This is something that notoriously CTO’s are brilliant at. They sell the off-shore investment to the board in waves of promised saved expenditure. Then they drain the local IT resource almost to melting point in order to maintain the accepted poorer levels of service that inevitably follow through less expensive, culturally divided and geographically disjointed off-shore companies (not to say all are like this, some are brilliant!), but when saving money, the cheapest that promises the most usually wins out. Its only when service levels are at screaming point and someone on the board wants to know “how we got here”, that someone like me smiles at the recent departure of the brilliant CTO that conceptualised, tantalised and implemented the whole off-shore or outsourcing project. Once completed they took themselves and their fat bonus off to another unsuspecting company, with their gleaming reputation and another successful money saving exercise under their belt.

Guess what the new CTO’s plans are going to be for this year?