During the past couple of months, InfoWorld has been delving deep into the daily plight of IT: brutal workloads, dangerously low resources, and a widening knowledge gap between management and on-the-ground IT people immersed in increasingly complex technology. Add to... During the past couple of months, InfoWorld has been delving deep into the daily plight of IT: brutal workloads, dangerously low resources, and a widening knowledge gap between management and on-the-ground IT people immersed in increasingly complex technology.Add to that an implied threat hanging over many IT departments: If you won’t do the job, we’ll outsource it to someone who will. But as Ephraim Schwartz’s “Painful lessons from IT outsourcing” illustrates, companies that follow through on that threat are courting disaster if they fail to think through the repercussions.[ With longer hours and fewer resources, is IT reaching the end of its tether? Check out Tom Kaneshige’s “IT workers pushed to the limits.” ] Ephraim’s article isn’t just another tale of misadventures with overseas service providers. The story kicks off with a $4 billion nightmare engagement between big-time consultancy EDS (recently bought by HP) and the U.S. Navy. That particular example is a classic case of requirements bloat. But blind ambition to cut costs or just “get it done” — without talking to the IT people who are closest to the problem — remains the most common cause of disaster.I’ve seen my share of this kind of thing. At the tail end of the go-go ’90s, I worked for a company that decided to completely outsource the development of its next-generation Web site to one of those “creative” design houses that sprang up like mushrooms in those days. I’ll give them credit; they really wanted to push the envelope of what a Web site could do back then, but I could tell it was all talk. I did my best to convince the CEO that the firm couldn’t possibly deliver on what it was promising — and got labeled as a naysayer. You know the rest.Fortunately, my most recent experience is a happier one. By now you may have noticed that InfoWorld has a new, streamlined home page. We’ve removed quite a bit of clutter to help promote our best material every day. I can’t say this was a huge development effort, but at least we did it ourselves. A special thanks to John Anane-Sefah for his design, and Chris Lin and Val Galluzzo, who coded like maniacs and did a fabulous job. Technology Industry