Outsourcing is the order of the day. Whether you are a major organization or a small or medium sized enterprise, the concept is to outsource the grunge work. Outsourcing saves expensive staff for projects, architecture, and other high value high visibility projects, reduce the staff hours spent doing grunge work, and over all improve the quality of the work environment. This is probably one of the better ideas, both from the social aspect, as well as from the business aspect.

From the business aspect, consider an average employee who costs 85,000 dollars a year, +10% taxes, plus an average 25% in perks, benefits, medical and dental. This brings up the average cost of an employee to a little below 117,000 dollars. This is a rough rule of thumb, and the same holds true for network admin and system admin. Outsourcing day-to-day simple tasks, or about five people in a medium sized company, can save somewhere on the order of 600,000K in employee costs. If you can outsource these kinds of tasks, and you can usually negotiate a contract for that in the 400,000 to 450,000 range, with an instant savings that is apparent to management.

In a medium sized enterprise you may need only one manager in the company to keep an eye on and track the outsource company. That one manager should have the authorization and authority to deal with every outsourcing issue. One point of contact for both companies can help communications and keep the operation moving smoothly.

You have staff available then for the high priority, high value, high visibility projects, that are fun, exciting, new, and otherwise can give folks a high quality of work environment where they can go build something, be innovative and entrepreneurial.

From the work social aspect, you can work on building out the innovative environment when the day-to-day management of the thousands of small tasks is no longer your issue.