Unit 12 IT Technical Support M2

M2 Explain the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing technical support

What is outsourcing?

Outsourcing  is when you get the source that you need from outside of your company. Companies and organisations will pay other companies that provides specific services which they cant do it themselves. There is different types of outsourcing for example (recycling your computer components or email service) .

What is the advantage of outsourcing?

•      Firstly, if your company doesn’t have the specific skills that is needed to do the work, they can ask other companies that provide the service. they will do the work for you if you pay a specific amount of fee. They can help with jobs that are harder to do yourself like managing your network or simple as organising your files and documents. Outsourcing will save a lot of time because you don’t need to search for people and the work will be done by a professional. 

•      Secondly, it is cheaper to do outsourcing over the seas than in the country because they will do your work for a less amount of money. You can less your computer system or any device to other countries like France or china and they will do it for less amount of money because of the differences in currency. For example: if you are a big organisation that has a lot of computer to be repaired, it is much cheaper to fix them I you send it to a Asian country because they will charge you less money for their service. the organisation can send the computer system to the technical who is in Asia and he will fix it then send it back.

•     Thirdly, if the company uses outsourcing for some of their work, they will have extra time to do other tasks that are important at the moment. This will relieve stress on the workers and the company will run smoothly without any heath problem or technical problems. Jobs like network administrator will be stressful and have a help from outside will make it easier on your company. You can give them instruction on how to run the network, maintain and etc…

        Your will focus on the most important at the moment and leave the rest to the people that you paid for the service. 

What is the disadvantage of outsourcing? 

•     Firstly, some of the outsourcing services that you have will not be close to your company so it may take a lot of time to deliver and repair the computer system or devices. Mostly all outsourcing service that are related to IT will be further away from your company, you will have to call the service provider to pick up the system that you want them to check for problems and then they will fix the system for a fee or leave the system if they can’t fix it. But it will take weeks to fix the computers because they have other things to do so you will need to make your customers wait until you get the hardware.

•     Secondly, if you outsource your work overseas, there will be a time differences which will be a disadvantage because you will have difficulties communicating with the service provider.  For example: if you are in uk and you have send your systems to new York for repair, there will be 7 to 9 hours differences which means that you will need to call them in the night if you want to communicate with them.

•    Thirdly, if you get your service from overseas like china, you will have difficulties with languages because they speak a different language from yours. There is a language barrier between the company and the service provider and it will be difficult to ask for a specific help tat you want from them. You will have less option on service providers that are overseas if you don’t know their language. If you speak English, you can get help from these countries like USA, UK, Canadian and etc.