[Joeri]

I saw this at work from the inside of a big telco that did this. They replaced one guy who needed only vague instructions to configure complex software replaced by a team of five who needed detailed step-by-step manuals written out by the vendor and still took twice as long and couldn't cope with any hiccups along the way.

I do not believe outsourcing saves money. It only does so either by cutting quality of service, or in cases where the IT department was heavily mismanaged anyway. Bring in capable management and you don't need to outsource.

[billharrison]

I've never seen a case where outsourcing of general-purpose IT things saves money over the long-term. It might make the budget look better for a year or two. Which, I think, is the motivation for a lot of the people making decisions to outsource. It is cheaper right now, so who cares about later?

Special-purpose stuff can still be cheaper to outsource, though. If I need something to work next week and it would take my staff a month to get up to speed, I'd spend the money on outsourcing it.