engleski

Reliance on Own Expertise vs. Imported Solutions - Case Study of a Small Medium Developed Country

The paper is a case study in information technologies from Croatia, a small, medium developed transitional European country. Encompassing a period of the last 15 years, a comparison is made between reliance on proprietary knowledge and use of foreign expertise. It reflects the view of the leader of a university based team. The author and the members of his team have been engaged in development, research, consulting and evaluation of some important local information technology projects. The projects range from university related applications, like the student administration and subsidised aliment, libraries and educational tools ; over state institutions like Ministries of Defence, Environmental Protection and Physical Planning, Health, insurance and the Census Bureau ; state owned companies like Railways and Electricity ; up to private companies like a thermoplastic factory. Direct or indirect experience has shown some common characteristics regarding the outcome: high commitment and motivation within the institution are most important. The second factor for success is achieved by building and maintaining own expertise in information technology. Pure relying on outsourcing and especially on exclusively foreign expertise is costly and often unsatisfactory. Uncritical acceptance of foreign experience, taken out of context and without proper understanding, can be harmful. Formally, this cannot be easily proved because such unfavourable outcomes are rarely published and the decision makers often pretend that such projects were success. On the other hand, autarchy is impossible under contemporary globalisation and it would do no good either. If in some segments no domestic expertise is available, the foreign experts should be paid according to the achieved results and by no means on hourly base. Of course, short consultancies are excluded from that rule. The author believes that the information system of any complex organisation belongs to its core business, that it can be neither uncritically copied nor completely outsourced. It can be outsourced only in case if the outsourcer is equally or even more interested and motivated for success as the customer. Main conclusions are that the best investment is the one in own knowledge and that so-called world’ s best practices should not be mechanically copied without proper understanding.

Knowledge ; Consultancy ; Computerization

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