IT Infrastructure Outsourcing

Reitzel division has realized success and development as a result of its great profitability ambitious goals set to maximize profit and revenues. This division contributes the greatest percentage of the company’s total profit. Schaeffer Corporation needs to make choices whether to continue with the predominant IT structure or else outsource its information technology services. The corporation utilizes the Gunter consulting group in order to examine and analyze IT services. When Schaeffer Company chooses to outsource IT infrastructure, this decision will benefit the company a lot. Outsourcing IT infrastructure service may not be necessary for all the three divisions. Schaeffer ‘suggestion to outsource IT services encounter high-pitched disagreements because outsourcing is not essential in all the three division. This issue has been supported by division heads.

Benefits Schaeffer Hope to achieve by outsourcing IT Infrastructure Services Schaeffer has to ensure constant growth and development; hence the management team proposed that the organization should outsource its IT infrastructure service. By outsourcing their IT services, the company will benefit in various ways. Schaeffer will have access to well-trained and experienced staff that is able to adjust to the company’s unforeseen dynamic needs without difficulty. The company will attract and retain individuals with outstanding talents and invest in an extensive training program in order to achieve opportunities that are difficult to achieve with the existing IT structure. Fourthly, outsourcing IT services will not only give Schaeffer manpower and services they need but the company will have full-package service including facilities management, management, monitoring and other support.

Outsourcing providers will manage their operations, but the company will retain full control without investing much of their time. Schaeffer faces numerous challenges that require the company to expand their IT infrastructure. It is evident that they do not know what they should ask the vendor. Gartner consulting group helped the company examine and explore the issue. Below is a stepwise procedure that Schaeffer folks took to develop the request proposal. Schaeffer Company did a thorough research on IT infrastructure outsourcing and define what the company is seeking. The company cannot jump into developing RFP without doing research. The folks spent month’s collection information about themselves. They studied their towers which are the data centers, data networks, and voice, distributed computing and help desk.

They also collected information about the local area networks. Schaeffer identified the necessary information the company needs from the vendor. The spent several months writing a request for proposal to give to the vendors. Secondly, the opponents suggested that there were a lot of unrecognized risks in the request for proposal form. They argued that if they become unsatisfied with the company’s performance, then they would be required to remove in-house IT capabilities (Han, 2013). If the outsourcing relationships fail to work well, then Schaeffer will incur tremendous costs to bring it back. Thirdly, the opponents argued that outsourcing IT infrastructure services will impact negatively on the morale and commitment of workers to the company. The people employed in the IT department will lose their jobs if the company chooses to outsource IT infrastructure services.

Outsourcing has both additional costs and additional benefits. The managers need to weigh both the costs and benefits in order to make an optimum decision. Suggested Alternatives by the Managers The managers recognized that Schaeffer world has completely changed (Han, 2013). Therefore, they need to move their mindset to the 21st century whereby IT corporations will be managers of IT infrastructure providers, instead of them offering the services. These pose a great challenge to the IT staff because they will need to maintain relationships with ABC and also develop a closer relationship with customers in order to ensure that IT effectively supports the strategic direction and necessary needs of the corporation. It would be better to outsource Reitzel division partially. For instance, outsourcing part of the phone system, data center, network and leave the rest of the IT infrastructure as it was.

This would be an added benefit for the Schaeffer to retain its current IT staff. This would not be possible because all the three divisions work under one consolidated IT department. Breaking the IT department would take a lot of time and it will be costlier. Some of the reasons include; first, it was a new idea that fosters so many unforeseen risks than opportunities. By choosing the idea to outsource, would mean taking risks and investing huge funds on a project that would take time to promote growth. The second reason is that there were speculations that most of the ABC staffs would be situated far away, and only a few IT will be positioned in Vilonia. It would be difficult to locate the vendors in case Schaffer has problems especially if they require immediate action.