The reasons for leaving were varied. Number one left for a large salary increase. Number two left due to the pressure of the position’s responsibilities. Number three went to a Microsoft Solution Provider for "the professional challenge." Whatever the reason, after hiring and training three network administrators only to have them leave before the training investment paid off, I decided we needed to find a better way. Stopping the training was out of the question; as one of our colleagues has said, "The only thing worse than training them and having them leave is not training them and having them stay."

"Let’s just outsource the whole network," I told my staff. It was a naïve response, born of frustration and desperation, because it didn’t consider all the ramifications of such an action. Yet there was the germ of a good idea there.

Reasons
There are persuasive reasons for outsourcing network support. Everyone has a network; everyone needs network support. As a result, network professionals are in short supply, and competition for them is fierce. The bidding war that results from this competitive atmosphere may lead to high turnover, as we raid each other’s technical crews. For example, right now, individuals in my college’s technical support average slightly under 20 months of service in their current positions.

Experienced network professionals are highly paid, more highly paid than a college or university may be able to afford. An alternative is to take a good technician and train him or her for the position. This can also be expensive. Besides the class costs, newly trained administrators are only minimally competent. It takes months for them to effectively begin applying their training. This not-insignificant ramp-up time coupled with the high turnover further reduces the productive months an organization can expect from these high-in-demand professionals.

Ironically, the training you pay for makes the technician more marketable. It’s a vicious circle. You can try to hold onto them by making them agree to stay a set amount of time after training—say two years —or to repay a prorated amount based upon the number of months of their obligation that was not met. I’ve tried this too, but these agreements are difficult to enforce. Besides, even if you are successful with this, the last thing you want is a disgruntled employee, forced to remain at the institution, who has power over your entire network.

There is another incentive for outsourcing that should not be overlooked. A certain amount of angst is associated with the support of the network, pressure caused by balancing the demands of day-to-day activities, the emergency service calls, and the special projects. When you outsource, you get rid of all of this. Many problems—recruiting talent, training, supervising, and retaining them—become those of the outside firm. The stress of network support and completing special projects goes away as well. You are the client, not the supervisor, of the employee.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But does it work? Well, yes and no. First, let’s consider the options.

Options
You can outsource day-to-day service. This would include creating and removing accounts; changing network privileges; making backups; restoring lost data; installing and updating software; etc.

You can outsource emergency service. Networks have to run 24/7. Banker’s hours won’t suffice when servers crash, wires get severed, and hubs die.

You can outsource special projects. Networks have an organic quality. They grow, they evolve, they develop new capabilities. This evolution results from the addition of new hardware or software or the reconfiguration of the network architecture. The special work is more expensive on an hourly basis than paying your own staff. Outsourcers will tell you it really isn’t; they cover the costs of benefits, recruiting and training staff, and supervising them. However, even accounting for those elements, you pay a premium for contract labor.

With an outside firm, it’s more difficult to predict and contain costs. If you pay consultants on a time-and-materials basis, they work until the job is done. If it takes longer than estimated, too bad, and a $5,000 project can easily become a $10,000 headache or a $15,000 disaster.

Using outsourced staff to handle special network projects can remove stress from your own technical crew, but it can cause other organization problems. Your own employees want to grow professionally, but if all the challenging work is handled by the outsourcer, they may not get the opportunity. College technicians may resent the "good projects" going to consultants.

As with most consultants, outsourcers have little institutional loyalty. They aren’t really your employees; they work for somebody else. In addition, while they may know the business world, they usually don’t understand higher education, and this lack of understanding can cause problems. For example, the outsourcer may recommend a proxy server to provide firewall protection for the network from potential Internet hackers. All well and good, but as everyone knows, security is typically at odds with functionality. In order to make the network "safer," the consultant may block certain types of traffic, such as streaming audio or ftp. That may be fine in a corporate setting, but in an academic environment, where exploratory inquiry is the name of the game, this lost functionality can adversely affect instruction and scholarship.

There’s one other problem dealing with outsourcers, something I describe as the "hot dog" syndrome. Many technical staff get so focused on the technical challenge of a job that they sometimes lose sight of the organizational effect their tinkerings can have. Because outsourcers do not know the institution as well as a college staff member, they might be less sensitive to the ramifications of their actions. In addition, they are not your employees, so you have less control over them.

Some advice
Unless you have a whole lot more money available for consultants than we do, you will probably not be able to afford to outsource all network services and support. What we have finally settled on is using outsourcers for special projects.

This works wonderfully well. The stress of trying to do a special project on top of day-to-day work is effectively exorcised from the organization. Sending your own staff through a steep learning curve is no longer necessary, because even a mid-sized computer consulting firm has a host of technical people with different specialties. Because of this breadth and depth in knowledge and skills, they can implement special projects much more quickly, and then train your staff to maintain the new system.

Some advice to help ensure a successful outsourcing experience:

Carefully define your project. It is important to identify all the deliverables you expect. What is your minimum acceptable product? What is in the scope? What is out of scope? What is your deadline?

Try to cap the price of a project to control costs. There are two ways a consultant might bid a project. One is to offer a set price; the other is to work on a time-and-materials basis. Because of the uncertain nature of technology projects and their tendency to expand beyond the initial scope of the project definition, it may be difficult to get a consultant to offer a set price. If it is necessary to contract a job on a time-and-materials basis, try to negotiate that it will not exceed a certain price.

Make certain the consultant performs a knowledge transfer after the job is done. This should include training your staff and documenting the work.

Get a guarantee. These technologies are inherently unstable, so after the implementation occurs and the company says its job is done, have some agreed-upon "watch" period, during which if it crashes, they will come back and fix it for free.

Consider developing an ongoing relationship. Switching consultants on a regular basis may be a way to keep costs down on a project-by-project basis, but it may be penny-wise and pound-foolish. A sustained partnership with one or two vendors builds a sense of mutual commitment that can pay dividends over the years. But ...

... beware of locking yourself in. You need to check out the competition periodically. Your long-term consulting partner may begin to take you for granted, the price may go up and the service may go down. It pays to occasionally put projects out to bid just to make certain you are getting your money’s worth.