Group Members International Enterprise Hosted Social Networking Community Platforms

• To free up personnel to focus on other activities.
• To reduce costs and investment
• To do work which could not be accomplished in-house due to expertise.
• To increase speed, flexibility and innovation.

Domestic outsourcing does not always save money. That means most large companies and many small companies, are often disappointed when they aim to save money by outsourcing. When IT executives do consider their companies to be successful at outsourcing, it's usually because they are achieving other important benefits, such as freeing up management time and company resources such as staffing problems, system moves, acquisitions or platform changes. Since most hardware, software and services vendors do not have a world-class data center, they partner with someone who specializes in this service. Leave the specialties to the specialists.

So, when a company does outsource, cost is not the only key business driver. It’s a needed skill set that they can't replicate internally, and, due to timeliness, they need to have an outsource vendor assist them. The outsource vendor could take many different forms; a direct outsource agreement, a professional services engagement, or something else. But when they do deal with outsourcing arrangements, they focus on not just the costs as a business driver but what would it cost to replicate those systems internally, as well as what type of business continuity they would have to add on to any systems deployed that will be less expensive and easier to manage externally.

One fear of outsourcing is that it eliminates in house technical and IT jobs. This may not be the case for the SMB that neither has nor wants to invest in an in-house IT department to work on a single, one time only development project. If the company never had an IT department, outsourcing is a reliable and economic way to fulfill the company’s technical and developmental demands.

Outsourcing allows for more specialized technical and business areas than the current in house department may have. For instance, to develop and manage a social media and community application internally, instead of building up a large development and management staff, they can work with an outsource vendor (Group Members International) who has the expertise externally and bring then in on a consulting or contract basis. This allows companies to get a project completed in a very timely manner versus having somebody who will be on staff who does not have all of the required skill sets. So outsourcing is a better way of managing resources because the company can develop applications beyond the department’s personnel’s skill sets.