For me, with the current state and the situation of the school(Reader, I know you are a USEPian, so I think you have an idea what I’m talking about), I would choose insourcing rather than outsourcing. That’s just what I would prefer. Why?
First, the definition of insourcing from Wikipedia. I think this is the boring part, but we have to clarify first what we’re talking about here.
“Insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing; that is insourcing (or contracting in) is often defined as the delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal (but 'stand-alone') entity that specializes in that operation. Insourcing is a business decision that is often made to maintain control of critical production or competencies. An alternate use of the term implies transferring jobs to within the country where the term is used, either by hiring local subcontractors or building a facility.”
Simply put, insourcing is using the company’s own resources (e.g. staff), to do the tasks that the companies does and not relying on third party companies outside the company or the country. That thing I mentioned there is also known as outsourcing, which is one of the choices in the question.
Again, let us the power of the Internet to supply us with knowledge that we need to do our assignments. This is the definition of outsourcing from Wikipedia.
“Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering cost or making better use of time and energy costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of land, labor, capital, (information) technology and resources. Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s. It is essentially a division of labour.”
In-sourcing for me is better for this school than outsourcing. First is, why outsource when we have capable people in the University that could develop and maintain information functions in this school? Presenting… the Institute of Computing! Here in the University of Southeastern Philippines, we have the Institute of Computing, located inside the USEP College of Engineering building. We have two courses available for the undergrads, which are Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, and Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I could say that the faculty of the Institute of Computing are good and intelligent people, being a student of the said college itself. We have competent teachers here in the school that could do what is needed to do with the information systems of the school, so why find third party companies or people outside the school? Why waste time finding people outside when you have people that could do the job inside the school? Not to mention that these teachers also have passed the teaching standards of the school.
Think also that this lovable school of ours is a public school. That means that the school gets its funds from the government, right? And I think also from its income generating projects. I think there’s no need for me to tell you that the school is having problems with its budget, because I think you can see it clearly. So why settle to outsourcing, when it requires more money? I’ve read that companies result to insourcing because it reduces the cost of taxes. And the reduction of taxes means less money to spend. That’s a plus for the school. So that’s another reason why its good to insource than to outsource.
Next is, outsourcing has many disadvantages to the school. I got some disadvantages of outsourcing from Wikipedia, and I’m going to put it here. But I’m not just gonna “copy-paste” it. I have to point out those that are connected with the school, so “copy-paste” is not applicable. Here are those disadvantages:
DISADVANTAGES OF OUTSOURCING:
QUALITY RISK
First is Quality Risk. If the university is going to outsource the handling of its information systems, then there is a risk of the quality of services/products being not too good or at a low standard or something like that. That is a very big possibility because the university can’t always keep track and observe the supplier of the services. The supplier could meet the initial requirements of the university, but later on, it could replace its personnel with novice or less experienced workers, thereby degrading the quality of the products/services it provides. And according to my source, unless the company conducts customer satisfaction surveys, they may eventually be caught in a surprise of customer chum, and when they find out the root cause, it could be too late. For the university, if it wouldn’t listen to the complaints of the students, or the suggestions and the recommendations of the faculty and staff and those that have knowledge on the matter, then the University would just be spending big amounts of money for low quality services/products. And if the University finds out that the problem is the issue of outsourcing, and if it’s too late, then that would be a big problem for the University.
PUBLIC OPINION
There are several public opinions about outsourcing. According to what I have read from Wikipedia.com, there is a strong public opinion that says outsourcing (especially when compared with offshoring), damages a local market. That is true, because when a company outsources, then it will not have to depend on the labor coming locally, and that means unemployment for the local community. Then, unemployment could lead to loss of income and financial crisis.
SECURITY
Security is a very important and sensitive issue when it comes to outsourcing. In a company, the management is always liable for the actions that its employees and staff make. If someone does something illegal or something like that, it’s not only that person’s reputation at stake, but also the company’s. And from that, we can say that security is an issue to companies that don’t outsource and have their own line-up of staff, right? And also from that, we can say that the security issue that I’m talking about will become bigger if the company will outsource. Why? Because when you outsource, then that means that you transfer the tasks of your employees to an outsourcer that you seldom see and come in contact with, personally. This causes legal and security issues when problems arise and the task of the outsourcer is involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment