Outsourcing in Intercollegiate Athletics Essay -- Sports, Athletes, FB

Division I intercollegiate athletic departments, especially those that are home to football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams, increasingly resemble front offices of professional sport organizations in respect to their mission and business trading operations. With huge operating budgets, state-of-the-art facilities, initiatory athletes, and multinational corporate sponsors, these sport businesses strive to produce winning teams and profitable events every season. The outsourcing of marketing operations and rights is common practice in American college play today. According to Li and Burden (2002), more than one half of all NCAA Division I-A athletic programs have outsourced some or all of their marketing operations and rights to a growing number of nationally prominent outsourcing agencies. Among the operations commonly outsourced are the production of radio game broadcasts, production of radio call-in shows, coaches boob tube shows, sales of media and venue advertising, sales of offi cial sponsorship rights to corporations, and production and management of Internet websites, etc. (Li & Burden, 2002).Outsourcing simply means acquiring services from an external organization instead of using internal resources (Butler, 2000). By using outsourced resources, organizations can gain a competitive advantage by utilizing contingent staff to accomplish strategic goals without incur the fixed overhead. By focusing on the leading edge and highly specialized skill sets, outsourcing providers can often offer higher quality services, or at a lower price than the client organization. Typical reasons for outsourcing go beyond simple contingent staffing. Outsourcing providers are able to maintain economies of scale with regard to specialization (... ... bring the anticipated benefits, and in some instances can be a risky proposition (Chin, 2003). Villcocks and Lacity (1998) stated that among the possible disadvantages are the potential disadvantage of control over critical fun ctions such as timeliness and quality of service, difficulty in monitoring vendor performance, difficulty in explaining the business take to vendors, the potential for loss of company secrets as well as intellectual property, and the high cost of outsourcing contracts. Schools also risk developing a dependency on outside agencies, lowering employee morale, loss of development skills for employees, and having to face the prospect of managing relationships that go wrong (Kakabadse & Kakabadse, 2000 Hayes, 2001). By outsourcing, not only do schools lose some of the face-to-face touch in servicing their employees but their clients as well (Rombel, 2002).