Trinidad: For Blue Cross, we've outsourced our main system and our financial system. It is not even locally produced, it was made by someone else. The difficulty there lies in the link between our office and that area, so we had to commission a telco to provide that service. We've outsourced our email system and our hospital network as well. I agree with Mr. Ferrer that you have to have a plan if you are willing to outsource, because it has to gain approval from your management. There are cases where outsourcing is more costly at the beginning, but in the long run, it will be cheaper, especially in manpower services. It's really hard, for example, to get a good developer nowadays that the company can afford.

Sangalang: Like what I mentioned earlier, our company direction mandates us to prepare a number of projects for three years, but we have limited resources. We want to implement a major enterprise project in less than two years, what do we do? You really have to outsource. I'm happy we made that bold decision to outsource, because if not, I'm sure I'm still implementing the projects until now. I may also still have problems with my staff, especially in managing the skills that they have. Outsourcing has a contract, has an SLA, has expectations and targets set. It has really been significant for our organization.

Ferrer: For a lot of outsourcing that we've done for maintenance and operations, management is more satisfied than happy. Sure, my boss won't thank me if I keep the e-mail systems up, in the same way that I'm not going to send flowers to our provider for keeping our outsourced tasks running. But there are some areas like, for example, we hired someone to go to each user and executive and try to get their ideas, transform them into something physical. During the plenary session, these consultants tried to share their best practices and the executives looked at me, saying, "Yes, that is where we want to go." There's no way I can bring that knowledge to them if I do it myself. But after that, my executives suddenly learned to trust me. That value of outsourcing really makes me happy, because I utilize somebody else's knowledge. I mentioned the billing system earlier, where I got a network and a software guy to fix it. Everybody was happy then, and in fact, our system even improved because we bought the skills--not the time, not the manpower, but the expertise. And that makes me happy.

Dela Cruz: I believe that is the expectation of the management from their CIOs, and they are very much aware that if we outsource services, we outsourced the technical expertise and know-how. In my case, in the past years, outsourcing made me happy because it makes life easier for us, especially for the technical support group. Just as well, we learn from these providers. Outsourcing those projects I have in the pipeline is something that I have to check if I will be happy in the long run.