Problem:

Recently I was engaged in some IT consulting work at a university of about 5,000 students with a total annual institutional budget in excess of $200 million. What I found was that half of their IT organization devoted to deploying and maintaining their ERP system environment was outsourced to an IT vendor, meaning that those approximately 15 staff members and their management team were employees of the private firm, while the remainder of the IT department of about 30 employees were university employees.

Required:

Question 1) Write an essay of between 750-1,000 words succintly discussing the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing that you discern from the mini-case presented here.

Question 2) Try to answer the question as to why the university might have made the decision to outsource this function.

Provide thorough explanation of the given question.