Do It In House

This morning, I was struck by this nice write-up about how the Hungarian railway accurately geo-located and inventoried their assets:

The work was done entirely by MAV employees which made it much less expensive than if external contractors would have had to have been used. Overall it is estimated that as a result of using internal resources and a GPS/GLONASS-based approach the project was 16 times more efficient than a traditional survey. And the project generated a lot of pride among MAV employees who carried out the work because it was such a remarkable achievement from a data collection, management and quality perspective.

Here’s is an incredibly stupid thing for a consultant to say, but nonetheless: if you can do it in house, why wouldn’t you? Even if it’s a bit of a stretch, your in house resources:

• have a predictable cost structure
• already understand your core business
• have a feel for the historical reasoning behind business processes

New IT infrastructure is strategic almost by definition. Why would you outsource your most important strategic initiatives? If you’re anticipating failure, perhaps it’s a good idea. But if you succeed, you’ve just invested in building intellectual capital in a population of people outside your organization. And you’ve lowered the engagement of your core staff in the future of the organization.

Familiarity breeds contempt, and it’s all too common that management is most contemptuous of the people they are most familiar with: their own staff. Hence the lure of the shiny consultant (love me! I’m shiny!).