Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
Ticket #723 is a thread coming from the paragraph that says:
All outsourcing must
be via well-defined contracts or equivalent instruments. If any
functions are performed in-house, they must be clearly specified and
documented with well-defined deliverables, service level agreements,
and transparent accounting for the cost of such functions.
The two topics raised in that thread are whether the requirements need
to be placed on both in-house and outsourced services, and whether the
requirement for transparent accounting was overkill.
In the discussion that led to this paragraph, the point was made that a
contract for a service usually documents deliverables, SLAs and so on,
while it's been observed that if one does a function inhouse (whether
it's telephone service, accounts-keeping or a full document publishing
function), one may see that the function is either not accounted for at
all or it is lumped into a general lump sum such as "overhead". Then
it's hard to be transparent, since it's not documented what was done,
whether it fulfilled requirements, or what it cost.
My worry is more in the direction of "state principles, not mechanisms"
- that the requirement here is specifying too much about how to do these
things, rather than why it should be a certain way.
So while my first instinct is to suggest that this is "no change
needed", I'm instead sending this out with "discussion".....
Well, I go for "no change" as in Bert's note on the same ticket.
It's all too easy to fall in the trap of hiding hard-to-classify
expenses under "general," and it's a mistake that comes back to
hurt you later. "Transparent accounting" is a principle worth stating.
Brian
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