There's more to NASA then flying shuttles to outer space.
In fact, there's a whole lot going on behind the scenes now that
the rocket scientists are simplifying their IT infrastructure
management, including the outsourcing of desktop services.
Darryl A. Smith, deputy program manager for the Outsourcing
Desktop Initiative for NASA (ODIN), said that they chose to
outsource because they wanted to share the risk from the government
to the outsourcer.
"We didn't want to be burdened with the responsibility of
maintaining IT infrastructure," said Smith via satellite to an ITAC
outsourcing conference in Toronto on April 12. "And it allowed us
to focus more on our core mission activities."
Smith said something that organizations should consider when
looking to outsource is to increase the need for system and product
interoperability across enterprises.
"One of the things we wanted to streamline was the ability for
our programs and projects within our organizations to read and
utilize documents anywhere within the organization," he said. "That
is essentially ensuring business functionality."
Microsoft also believes stabilizing business functionality is
its outsourcing objective, according to Jeff Chia, senior
technologist, Ontario Public Sector with Microsoft Canada.
"The key really is to take advantage of the latest technology
that makes sense for your industry," said Chia. "You really need to
know what your core business is, and focus on that."
NASA's process did have a little turbulence because they had an
insufficient change management strategy, according to Smith.
"We really underestimated how much of a culture shock moving to
this outsource vehicle would be," he said. "And NASA's a largely
contracted environment."
It was really challenging to change to a more precise and
contained environment, he said.
"There was no agency-wide ODIN implementation policy; no
governance model whatsoever and that proved problematic early in
the development of the program," Smith said. "It was one of the
things we were able to overcome."
He added that NASA is one of the few government agencies that
really took the plunge earlier on, in the late 70s and early 80s,
in contracting out a lot of their services.
Tarwinder Labana, IT global consultant, managed desktop services
with Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co., said that businesses need to
understand what their internal drivers are that are causing them to
outsource.
"When you understand, and you invest the time up front in those
business drivers and requirements, only then can you actually
architect solutions that fit into the client's needs," said
Labana.
"It's also important to have strong relationships between the
contractor and the client, this is one of the lessons learned from
ODIN," said Smith. "We transformed our relationship between our
contractor and NASA from adversarial to collaborative."
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