Selling the Family Jewels
Ian Bailey
Well, those days are now gone, and a new trend in IT is beginning to emerge. It would seem that, not content with simply outsourcing the management of their IT to a services company, some organisations are actually handing the whole lot over to them. This often means that any new systems developed are not owned by the customer, but by the services company. The argument is that it allows the outsourcer to call upon expertise in other sites, and potentially reduce the application development cost by spreading it across more than one customer. Excellent news surely ? But what about when you want to get the data out ? Sure, it’s your data and you can have it, but you have no right to see the underlying data model (not your IPR). This pretty much leaves you with only one option – pay the services company to extract your data for you.
If we’re smart, we will have specified a clause in the outsourcing contract ensuring that the system owner is obliged to provide us with the data in a standard format (for which we will have paid). If we’re really smart, we will have chosen a standard with a data model behind it (i.e. not just said “XML”). Even then, can you be sure that this will capture all the information in the system – there’s no way to know, ‘cos you’re not allowed to see the internal data model of the system. Hmmm…
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