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What's the Difference Between Irish and Polish Sausage?
9/30/2004
In a sense, each of the ethnic groups involved in holding fairs had outsourced their production of sausage to companies that could do it cheaper. One of the reasons those sausage vendors could do it cheaper was economy of scale. It just costs more to produce a dozen different varieties of sausage than it d'es to just make one sausage and market it (with signs and banners) as a different sausage each week. But a whole lot is lost as a result.
Returning to Ms. C and Mr. C, the pharmaceutical company that has outsourced everything but the management of vendor contracts has lost most of its topically related institutional memory. When Ms. C leaves, someday, every bit of its institutional memory in that area will be gone and available only from vendors. If you have good vendors and a good relationship with them, that can be okay. But it will become more and more difficult to even know. And if the outsourcing were to be in the IT realm, and it were to go high enough, the company would lose even the option of having intelligent IT input to its strategic processes and planning.
The college still has Mr. C's institutional memory and also has his buy-in
to its mission and vision. That will make every bit of difference if the IT
products and services he produces and manages are critical to the institution--and,
of course, they are. Mr. C is also there to participate in strategic processes
and planning. His college has retained the ability to make genuine "higher
education sausage."
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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