Fourth principle of infrastructure realignment: all modes of connectivity infrastructure should be treated as commoditized utilities, best sourced outside the firm.
Infrastructure technologies such as VOIP, wireless networking and web services all depend on significant resources that are inherently utility-like in their differences from the PBX, LAN and client-server infrastructure they replace or supersede. Whether it ever made sense for businesses the size of most AEC firms to build and maintain their own phone, data and content networks, the underlying rationale has now changed.

Outsourcing of phones, networking, email and the like in today's technology environment can easily achieve better quality, greater reliability and lower cost than in-house management of these services. Furthermore, technology staff time is freed from generic drudgery that adds little value from the clients' perspective to focus instead on practice-specific technologies that enhance value delivered to clients.

Outsourcing need not—perhaps should not—extend to outside hosting (by application service providers—ASPs) of key business applications and data, such as design tools for architects, analysis and calculation for engineers or resource scheduling for contractors. While many AEC businesses are rightly concerned about the potential risks of hosting mission-critical applications outside the firm, a "hidden" benefit of outsourcing is the robustness of data and "survivability" of applications that an outsourced—hence, distributed—infrastructure can provide in a dangerous and uncertain world.
JL

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