Discussion this week comes in two part s - Part one , for your consumption of technological resources at work (if not a work use the university) try and find out how they are charged - what do you see as the practical benefits and problems with that approach? Part two, try and an identify a system or component of a system that would lend itself to outsourcing. Say why and identify some benefits and costs associated with doing so. (You may incorporate both parts into one psoting)
Try to look up this information for Walter Reed Hospital, Bethesda Maryland
Sample 1
People are the most important technological resources, without them no products and ideas would exist. They create design ideas and are being implemented and used. In preparation for the transition of the hospital's system from Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to Electronic Health Record (EHR) the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has launched a massive planning to be able to implement the new system without disrupting the operations and not causing any untoward patient safety issues. For the last 2 years prior to its Go-live in March of 2016 the institution started hiring people to manage a new Department called Electronic Information Systems. People were trained in Wisconsin to prepare themselves for the great task. However with the new staff hired the institution realized that employees totaling to about 20,000 will be impacted with the new system and that they would require training to learn the system. To solve the pressing problem of training employees with minimal cost comparing to sending all employees to Wisconsin for a 4 weeks training, the Institution hired contractual EPIC employees to come to Houston and train the rest of the employees.
Around 1,500 support individuals were hired for a period of 1 year and half of them were extended for another 12 months to make sure that transition would be smooth and uneventful. Currently about 100 more are staying until the end of the year to help out solve some technical issues as we continue moving forward with the EHR system. The idea to hire contractual people was the best move to lessen the cost without compromising quality and patient safety. As the institution moves forward using the new electronic system, less and less people will be needed to help support the technical issues which can be handled by the people manning the newly opened Electronic Information Systems Department.
Another approach that MD Anderson does using outsourcing are the computers used in the entire institution. This equipment's are being leased from a certain company for a period of 6 years. Benefits associated with leasing includes keeping the computers up to date, we know for a fact that equipment's such as computers will become obsolete with leasing, you pass the financial burden of obsolescence to the leasing company. Another benefit, is that you don't pay nothing upfront newly acquired computers may be readily used without tapping much funds. It has also a predictable monthly expense which can help budget more effectively.
Sample 2
My organization is treated as a tenant unit within an installation or building complex. As a tenant unit we are charged for our technological resources via the overhead method. In fact, we are charged for all installation resources via the overhead method. This method makes things very simple. A Memorandum of Agreement is crafted and revalidated every year for our unit to operate within the greater context of the Army installation and therefore the language has to be very simple since it is not easily changed after the fact. While the corporate world may have rigid budgeting processes the government and specifically the Department of Defense has extremely rigid budgeting rules and therefore outlining cost structures once a year is the best that you are going to get. Once the budget is allocated, this allows the IS function to know what their budget looks like and allocate resources to areas they deem necessary.
The drawback from this approach is that the customer, my unit, does not necessarily have very much input once the budget is defined. If something comes up and changes need to be made, we have to wait until the next fiscal year to make anything happen. Additionally, the IS function does not feel a sense of urgency to provide customer service or troubleshooting assistance since we are just one of their customers and they know their budget is going to be paid whether we use their services or not. This leads to little accountability to our unit and makes them less responsive while offering poorer service.
While we rely on the IS function to provide all of our IT support and basic infrastructure, we do outsource some of our IS support. One area that we outsource is database management. We manage a significant amount of personnel data/records and we outsourced via a third party contract to initially create a database and then update and maintain the database. This allowed us to use a contractor that developed similar HR databases for the corporate world outside of the Department of Defense and leverage expertise that would otherwise be unavailable to us. In other words, we used outsourcing to gain access to superior talent. Additionally, outsourcing allowed our unit to focus on our core competencies. We used other talent to develop and maintain a database and therefore we were allowed to focus solely on our HR mission and take care of our customers.
The negative side of outsourcing and using a contract to develop/maintain this database is that there are limitations to changing the contract's requirements. The contract process in the US Government is very tedious and lengthy and therefore you are required to put a significant amount of detail in the contract which lasts an extended period. As the world changes and new requirements arise, it becomes very difficult to pivot and get the contract company to adjust our requirements because they are bound by a US Government contract to provide very specific services and no more.