I would like to access available research data which compares the
feasibility of hiring a full time Help Desk technician to service
calls from work stations in a corporation, VERSUS outsourcing the same
to companies which do this remotely and by phone and online
instruction.

I want the answer in clear studies with summaries which can help
corporations make the right choice.

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 14 Aug 2002 17:47 PDT

aryaone...

In researching this, several things quickly become apparent.
The cost-effectiveness of outsourcing is only part of the 
picture. Many companies which tried it are reverting to 
in-house IT departments due to poor performance. See:
http://www.computerworld.com/news/1999/story/0,11280,33696,00.html
for an excellent analysis of the pros & cons, including this:

"Broken help desk processes and problems aren't going to be
magically fixed by outsourcing," said Meta Group analyst
Kurt Johnson. "I can almost guarantee that companies
outsourcing help desks purely out of cost motivations
are going to end up dissatisfied."

A cost calculator, hosted by Nanodesk, is available at:
http://www.nanodesk.com/costcal_1.shtml

A case study of one success, from the provider side,
discusses Fused Solutions' success in developing and
running an outsourcing project, at:
http://www.cosmocom.com/CaseStudies/fusedsolutions.htm

A discussion of the overall benefits and challenges,
by Madeline Locke, IMI Systems' Global Director of
Help Desk Services, is available at:
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/articles/imi1298.htm

A case study of a company's strategy to improve their
IT department, and forestall the use of outsourcing:
http://ref.cern.ch/CERN/IT/US/2000/041/00073950.htm

And, finally, there are a HUGE number of technical
documents, available in .pdf form, from the B2B
community, "The Definitive Source for eBusiness
Technology and Solutions", at:
http://www.communityb2b.com/
Inclucing their library of outsourcing documents, at:
http://communityb2b.bitpipe.com/data/rlist?t=itmgmt_10_40_92

I'm fairly confident you'll find what you need among
the preceeding links, but I didn't post this as an
answer, as you'll need to review the .pdf studies
to see if they suit your inquiry.


Searches done, via Google:

"help desk outsourcing" + cost + studies
://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22help+desk+outsourcing%22+%2B+cost+%2B+studies

Feedback is always welcome...

sublime1-ga

Hello aryaone,

I recently went through this process at a corporation. I managed an
existing standard hours Help Desk which was going to be expanded to
24/7/365 and I needed to put together a proposal, one of the issues
being staffing. Some of the things that had to be taken into
consideration were:

- fucntions supported (e.g. applications, equipment, network,
communications, etc.)
- staff costs (e.g. salary, dollar values for vacation time/sick
time/training, cross-training costs, pager compensation, etc.)
- management of additional staff (during off-hours coverage, if
applicable)
- cost of transitioning knowledge transfer to an outsourcer
- cost of equipment and/or time to permit an outsourcer access to your
corporation's infrastructure (network, routers, etc.)
- initial and ongoing costs to be paid to the outsourcer
- language issues (if users are global) - i.e. can the outsource
company provide language translators or do they have multilingual
staff available
- procedures for outsource companies if their staff are sick or on
vacation
- procedures for accessing calls logged by the outsourcer (and for
them to access your call logging system)
- buy-in from affected parties (e.g. Help Desk staff at other of the
corporation's sites, business managers, users, etc.)

The list goes on and I'm sure you know all the above and more. The
reason I mentioned all of this was because I prepared my feasibility
study from pulling information from the HR department, who were able
to provide info on industry trends (e.g salaries, pager compensation,
etc). But in order to get the comparison of internal vs external
staff, I contacted the Gartner Group. However, our corporation is a
member (i.e. it's not free - they pay annually - I don't know the
cost). I first did my searches on their site for "outsource help desk"
and various other variations and was able to access a tremendous
amount of information, including the top outsource companies. For more
detailed questions, I was able to call their analysts.

The Gartner Group's website is:

http://www4.gartner.com/Init 

You can search their site for free and find documents. However, you
can only look at the topics the documents cover.

Gartner has been around for some time (over 20 years) and they are a
leader in the business of identifying and analyzing trends and
technologies worldwide.

Good luck with your feasibility study. It's challenging but an
interesting, educational and enjoyable process.

Regards,

ames