Mid-sized marketing firm outsources IT firing the single employee who had been there for 4 years, he gets a job paying $20k more: 'The first week after I left, their main server crashed. The outsourced company took 6 hours to respond, another 8 to fix it'

I've never understood outsourcing roles that have some sort of hands-on requirement. Certainly, there are numerous tasks within an organization that can be handled from a remote location. However, there are some things you just don't want handled by someone who is remote, especially very, very far away, where there is no way they could reach the site in any sort of urgent manner. If your business were an industrial operation, you wouldn't want to have a remote plumber or electrician. And almost certainly, it would be disastrous to have a remote firefighter. Can you imagine? 

So, when you're operating a business that deals primarily in information, you know, like a marketing firm, and you rely on technology in order to do your work. It's bewildering to me that you would consider outsourcing your Information Technology (IT) department. These guys are quite literally your firefighters for any sort of technological crisis you might have, from helping set up new computers, phones, and user accounts to managing the networks and entire systems that the company operates with. Besides, when it comes to end-user support, the whole point is being able to get hands-on with it to be able to use experience to eliminate issues caused by user error.

As is typical with this sort of thing, you often won't even know why they're there or what you're paying them for until you really need them. And this doubt and wondering has led many an upper management to turn the watchful, sleepless eye of cost-cutting onto their IT departments. Cutting into that pesky bottom line by getting rid of staff who "aren't doing anything anyway" feels pretty good when you're in upper management. But the next time your laptop won't turn on, the conference room screen isn't working before an important call, or there's an issue with the company's systems, you'll find yourself wondering just who the heck is supposed to be sorting all of this out for you.