There's an old saying, "Don't be penny wise and pound foolish." Don't insist on paying only pennies now if it's going to cost you pounds (or dollars) later.

After a few cost saving moves here and there and everywhere, it certainly does look that way, even for the smartest organization.

From each affected organization's view, it certainly does look like the moves are beneficial. However, i've seen, directly and indirectly, how work that used to belong to one organization get "unofficially" transferred to another organization. This is actually one of the better consequences.

One of the worst is the hiring of non-qualified personnel, perhaps with a language problem, or a lack of customer service perspective, to be the first line of support for a big business tool of ours. It's a common phenomenon felt by customers of organizations that outsourced their customer facing teams to that country.

People that do not even know what they are trying to resolve; pointing to the wrong folks; stating the bloody obvious, and trying to explain back-end fields and tables to END USERS that are not even remotely required to know such info!

Hence, cost savings on the support team means more work for the business units. Emails, investigations, analysis, pushbacks are all unnecessary added as the customers at the end still come back to the business units that they work with.

With the business units already short of manpower after their own cost savings, it would be helpful if the customer facing teams can buck up.

* end of ranting *