It's refreshing to read about IT issues from overseas from time to time, particularly when they are liberally peppered with bollocking and crikeys and codswallops, and so I give thanks to this article from the New Zealand Herald which comes by way of IT Business Edge, laying in to everything that is wrong with outsourcing today.

I think most of us can identify with Deborah Hill Cone and her encounter with various outsourced support centers and workers... although her experiences come in the context of moving house, no doubt most CIOs can come up with strikingly similar stories dealing with data centers and overseas support desks. And the thing that most frustrates Cone is also something we can identify with-there's no one there to take the blame when things fall through the cracks.

This is hardly confined to outsourcing, though. Any major corporation has essentially the same issue (or feature, depending on your point of view, I suppose) with multiple, vast departments which finger-point and fling the blame without any single point source of accountability anywhere in sight. Is dealing with outsourced technical support at the major PC manufacturer of your choice really any worse than getting bounced around between Bank of America's various commercial banking and credit operations, as happened to me recently? I thought a particularly fine touch was when, at the end of a long series of forwarded calls and "Press One For English" menu chains, the representative I talked to told me I could only get help by dialing a certain number... the one I had dialed originally that lead me to her.

There's no one to scream at in this situations, it's always laid off on someone else, somewhere else, and that's the genius of it... yell as you might, the person you are dealing with genuinely can't do a thing about the problem. Nor can the next, or the next that you talk to. The service, as a whole, doesn't really exist, it's all bits and pieces and never quite comes together.

For the CIO, what's to be done about this? The answer, of course, is a strong SLA and relationship with the place where you send the check. Because as in all business dealings, that's effectively where the power rests. If you can ensure ultimate responsibility-even as they probably seek to avoid it-in your vendor contact, then you retain some measure of power and, finally, have someone you can scream at who had better be able to do something about it.