Law firm Norton Rose is looking to avoid potential skills shortages by reducing the use of contractors and introducing flexible use of overseas workers.

Contractors represent about 10 per cent of the 100-strong IT workforce at the company. But if a project to outsource short-term needs to Indian IT staff is successful, it will be rolled out across other areas to meet temporary demand and gradually replace contractors.

“We want to have more flexibility in managing resources,” said Norton Rose chief information officer Jeff Roberts.

“We are aware of the risks involved in outsourcing, such as time zones and cultural factors, which may pose constraints and give us an overhead in the end. But we still want to try it,” he said.

Explaining the implications of the contract to permanent staff was an important consideration, said Roberts. “When I said we were temporarily using four Indian staff, there was a big emotional reaction,” he said.

“Funnily enough, BT has provided consultancy for our data network for years, Cisco manages our phone systems and nobody has ever thought of these services as outsourcing.”

Roberts organised briefing presentations to explain that the outsourcing project was not aiming to reduce the workforce, rather to improve consistency.

“We opted for outsourcing to accommodate the workflow because it is cheaper, the staff are knowledgeable and if we need to use their services again, we expect better continuity as they will know our way of working,” he said.

“I am also not ashamed to say that we are looking to save money. ­ UK-based contractors can be quite expensive.”