I would somewhat disagree with the thought that technology is not Disney's core competency. Technology is a really, really big deal for Disney and has been for a long time. It is a major part of their day-to-day across the entire company and they are quite competent at it. They didn't hand these tasks over to someone else because they were somehow better at it or Disney's people were incompetent. I simply cannot believe that.
Technology is not their core competency, marketing is. All of their technology would be far less valuable without Mickey, Elsa and Cinderella plastered all over it. Their C-suite may have decided that their technology department was too expensive and the needs of the business could be adequately served by an outside firm.
Quality likely didn't factor in to the decision; so long as it was good enough to not be a roadblock for their marketing teams.
But what are they marketing? It isn't just their characters and movies. Disney is huge and the majority of it heavily relies on technology of many types, including their marketing. I would say they don't have a single core competency, it is a multi-faceted company.
Re:My Position On The Disney Layoffs
by prostoalex on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @12:51PM
(#9733318)
This is the entity that controls Disney entertainment parks. I can see how in-house software engineering is important for some of their entities like Pixar, for Disneyland/Disneyworld it's hardly core competence.
Except that almost the entirety of the theme parks are run by technology to rival any other part of the company.
I was drawing up a reply that makes an analogy to home contractors using undocumented labor. (I won't entertain far-below-market bids because those contractors are certainly using undocumented labor.) But, then I realized that I eat in restaurants that most likely use undocumented labor, so I have no moral high ground on this issue. (sigh...)
Moving away from analogy to Disney contracting with an IT firm like Cognizant, just to draw a name from the list you provided. Cognizant is perfectly well documenting the labor, but they are stretching beyond recognition job definitions to get around the "spirit" of the H1B law.
It would be interesting for the US legal system to have an "...in the spirit of..." requirement in determining violation in these matters rather than strictly a "...conforms to the written letter of..." requirement. It might prevent some of this cat-and-mouse bs.
They just have to sign a contract with Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys/etc that says they will provide managed services covering X, Y and Z products for $X million per year. Managed services contracts allow a contractor to have near complete control over personnel decisions; the client doesn't ask questions about how they can do it so cheap because they have no say in the matter anyway. Managed services contracts are managed against SLAs, so as long as you meet your SLAs, you get paid.