I have been reviewing a couple of accounts that I have been working with of late and one has a small but dedicated it department and the other has three or four employees and pays Oracle to host financial applications like HR or payroll. When you think about it how different is this from outsourcing all HR functions to a company like Administaff. At my last job I actually worked for Administaff and not the company I represented.
This reviewing made me think what would I do if I were a CIO? My gut would be to host everything myself but that implies a large staff. Given my personality I probably would want HR and payroll hosted for me. Given that I want to play with everything having a contract SLA with a company like Orae host the apps would work best for me.
If I were a CEO or CFO I would probably lean towards outsourcing to Admnistaff because it does offload having an HR department and payroll system which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
probably a good thing that I am a technologist and not an executive.