Outsourcing ingenuity

Another update from my old database area. Although many people had been affected by the outsourcing we went through earlier, one area was inviolate: the Database Administrators or DBAs. These technical specialists are the experts on the inner workings of the database. To do this, they are entrusted with "God IDs" that have security rights to do anything, including deleting entire databases. Because of information security policy, these positions have to be held by employees and can't be outsourced.

At least I thought so until today. I was chatting with a friend in the hall, and she was complaining about her "pseudo DBA" - someone that performed DBA-like functions for her, but wasn't a "real DBA".

In fact, her pseudo DBA was an Indian contractor. The powers that be have figured out that you can't outsource real DBAs, but all jobs don't require DBA high security authority. Therefore many DBA tasks can be outsourced, reducing the number of DBAs needed. Ingenious!

One minor nitpicking point: the pseudo DBAs are somewhat less than proficient in DBA expertise. In fact, my friend had to spoon feed them the coding instructions for setting up her tables. And she had to point out to them that they had included redundant data items that weren't needed (database design is a core DBA expertise).

But this must be a good deal. Expenses are down - numbers don't lie.

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