Yes, relatively quiet the past couple of days I know. In part that’s because I picked up yet another 2 terabyte RAID drive and have been busy shuffling files around. And also things were a bit busy at work the past couple of days.

Which leads to an obvious lesson that is not known by my company’s senior management:

Over the past 3 or 4 years, a significant portion of our MIS support has been outsourced – most going to a single Indian firm, some going to other agencies and independent contractors.

The public face of outsourcing – IT people are told that contractors are being brought in to do the grunt work, leaving employees free to do the creative stuff. Management is told that headcount is reduced and contractors save money for a variety of reasons – mostly that they’re easier to get rid of.

Contractors have no sense of ownership and therefore most show little if any initiative. Especially when they come from a big outsourcing firm that has tens of thousands of employees and tends to shift them around from project to project every few months. Most of them simply do things as told – to the letter and are not adaptable to a rapidly changing environment.

See, most of the employees of this Indian firm have told me the same thing – the firm has this reputation in India that if you work for them for 3 years, you can jump to a better job or start your own company. With that knowledge in mind, how many are going to stick his or her neck out? Few, if any.

Here is this week’s example.

On Monday, Australia needed to do their year-end accounting close. Only when they started, they discovered that the previous week’s sales data had not made it into the data warehouse. So they called the only person on my staff who supports that warehouse in the region. But that person was not trained in some of the technologies that support the warehouse and, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley segregation of duty rules, does not have the administrator passwords for the database.

So this person waits for Mumbai to open for business. People in Mumbai supposedly spend the next 5 hours looking at the problem but are unable to resolve it.

At 6 PM HK time, London opens for business. So Mumbai passes the problem off to London – to more consultants from the same company who are “embedded” at our site. Eight hours later, they are still unable to resolve the problem. At 6 PM London time, I am informed that for some reason, they cannot successfully load the Asia Pacific database even though they can load the EMEA one. No problem, the contractor tells me, the people in Australia can just access the EMEA database.

Except ….

We’ve also outsourced systems account management to yet another company. And of course we’re SOX compliant. So the users in Australia can access the mirror database but first they need accounts and to get those they need to file forms with this third party company.

“That’s not gonna work!” I try to stay calm. They were supposed to close on Monday. They’ll come in on Tuesday, file the forms, and the accounts won’t be created until Wednesday at the earliest. “There’s nothing I can do, I’m just a consultant,” he responds. And he goes home for the day because it’s 6 PM.

So it’s now 2 AM HK time, 5 AM Australia time. I’m well aware that the users will be showing up for work in another 3 or 4 hours, expecting the issue to be resolved. I’m an employee, not a contractor. I think of my users as my clients and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them down.

I’ve already sent my boss in London an email earlier. He’s on vacation but said he’d be checking email regularly. No response from him, so I try his mobile phone, which of course rings right over to voicemail.

I send an email to the guy in London who has global responsibility for the data warehouse. I get back an auto-reply – he’s on vacation too! But a short while later, I get a real reply from him. At 8 PM London time, 4 AM Hong Kong time, we discuss the problem and what’s been attempted so far. And at 8 PM, on his vacation, he makes the decision to go into the office to try to resolve the problem.

The first thing he does once he gets there? He creates an account for the Australia EMEA users and creates and files a SOX exception report to explain why this needed to be done. So when the users arrive for work, they have an email explaining to them what’s been done and they can immediately start on the year-end close.

Several hours later, we find out why the files are loading on the EMEA server but not the Asia one. Somehow, over the weekend, the file gawk.exe managed to “disappear” from the Asia server. (gawk is a free implementation of awk, something that basically processes files with text-based data.) How this file managed to disappear is something that the wizards who tend to our servers are so far unable to explain. But I don’t plan to let it go.

Some corporations are run by giving their users the best possible tools and support for those tools, enabling people to be more effective in their jobs, hopefully leading to higher revenue. But I suspect those are in the minority.

The company I work for is in the majority – doing as little as possible and still pushing people as hard as possible to perform. This is a company that made the decision that when there’s a customer-facing requirement in a local language, that requirement will be met, but if the local language requirement is internal only, screw ‘em.

While this saves money on the front end – not implementing language packs for double-byte characters saves some money and time during installation and set-up and doesn’t serve as any inconvenience at all for the US or western European countries. But Eastern Europe and Asia (they did make an exception for Japan) are screwed. And I think if they add up all the time those employees spend having to manually produce local language reports, perhaps the dollar savings isn’t that great after all.

Corporations’ first responsibility is to make a profit for their shareholders. Those decisions are made by people though. The people who make those decisions receive million dollar bonuses and are in the bar each night at 5:30. The people who suffer through the results of those decisions make $10 bonuses and have to work around the clock.

Yes, I know, that’s life.

But excuse me if I’m feeling a little grumpy right now.