Re: The bizarre logic of outsourcing
It's sort of covered in posts above, but needs to be spelt out.
Many service functions in-house do a job which has evolved away from the original role to meet the needs of the organisation, ( and will continue to do so, if reasonably sensibly run.)
Defining what that department does, how it works and meets the organisational needs will not fit into some clever cut-and-dried theoretical model written into an SLA. There will be any number of specific functions that won't fit into that contract, or that the bean counters and outsourcers won't understand, as well as an infinite number of small variations of the "We don't clean Mrs. Jones' office on Wednesday evenings, because she's usually in meetings at another site all day. But we give it an extra good clean on Thursday because she has a big meeting and there are always biscuit crumbs everywhere" variety. Add into that the odd little useful jobs that the in-house people do because they are part of the joint endeavour, part of the team. For example the outsourced contract will specify wiping the desks with a damp cloth to remove dust. Cleaning the sticky mess of spilt coffee, lunches eaten at the desk and Friday afternoon cakes will be an "extra" that will be charged for at £10 per desk, but the in-house team just did this as a matter of course.. Where the contracting-out team are informed of these issues they tend to respond by denial ( "Well they shouldn't be eating at their desks").
Or to put it another way, outsourcing is A telling C what they think B does, without actually knowing what B does, how they do it or why they do it like that. Or how often this might have to be adapted, or how or why. And C entering into a contract with A based on what A told them the job was.
A great example I just remembered, our contractors had to supply paper towels. But no one had specified that this was for the staff rest area as well as the toilets. Or how much had to be supplied on what basis, or who had to supply extras if we ran out between refills. So the sodding towels sometimes ran out before the end of the month.