Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.

I don’t think that these two do justice to what it’s really going to be like – take the time in all about 10 minutes to watch the video’s, if for no other reason than to have advanced warning of what’s likely to happen to the customers.

It has been an interesting week, what with the anouncement that the work  will be off shored to IBM India. They may well be an experienced company when it comes to the outsourcing options available to companies, but the feedback that is coming through from various contacts in the industry is indicating that the level of support may mot be to the standard that is expected.

From what I’ve been told the video above may well be not to far off the mark, well as far as the customer service goes anyway. It is possible that the service that the company will receive might be up to the standard that they are looking for. But my bet is that the support will be closer to the Video, however I’m quite prepared to be pleasantly surprised. I have had personal experience of IBM India, they provided expensive support  for an application called ARC2SDE during the course of a major incident – I found my emails with questions posted in a forum for the product – attributed to IBM India’s support team. This as you can imagine didn’t seem all that fair at the time, as we had lost a support team and were paying IBM India a significant wedge for their support resource.

This support resource turned out to be a free forum, where the user community provided the support – a good way to earn a living if you can get methinks! Still that was a long time ago in a Galaxy far far away, but to be honest I think that the support for the current in house developed applications may be a bit more of a problem for an out sourcing company. Still the management seem to be bent on some talented way of making the thing foolproof. Just look at the recent debacle with Royal Bank of Scotland and it’s minor computer glitch, it was announced in the quarterly figures that they had budgeted an extraordinary one of cost of ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE MILLION POUNDS to cover the incident – in reality probably only a very small part of what they have saved by off shoring (currently LMAO).