IT is today a disrespected profession in corporate circles, as a direct result of the excesses of previous decades. I suspect the day of the in-house IT professional is nearly over in most firms, and outsourcing of the function in its entirety to dedicated IT companies using talent from multiple, local and remote locations (as in your example) is the future.
In my (limited) experience in dealing with tech older non-tech managers resented the inability to deal with IT staff because they were irreplaceable years ago; now they have replaced them with foreigners, and you have incompetents for whom you simply pay less money. It wasn’t worth it; a lot of the jobs that would be lost due to automation are actually being spared because of the inability of tech coolies to set it up.
“They feel that since aren’t getting what they pay for now, so what difference does it make if cheaper Indian H1B’s do the work? “
There is the money statement. Most programmers suck, terribly. So, if they suck then why not pay foreigners who suck even less.
The outsourced IT work has been anything but cheaper - equipment costs skyrocked as they replaced really poor buying decisions with reliable equipment. For example, at the Fort Wilderness Resort cabins, part of the daily ‘room checklist’, in addition to ensuring that there’s shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, cleaning staff was required to reboot each router daily as otherwise they’d lock up.
All of those defective routers were replaced, as well as replacing the resort wide deployment of CAT3 cable with CAT10 or fiber. And while the old IT group would handle a block of 8 rooms for ‘technology upgrades’, the outsourced company would descend with enough people to manage an entire wing in a day.
Saving money is not what Disney has done - they’ve placed a priority on improving the end results, and are paying through the nose for it, but what’s being purchased and installed will last far longer with far less maintenance, and as it is being done by an outside company, far easier for management to accept vs the penny wise, pound foolish attitude they gave the internal department.
Ultimately, what the in house department needed was the one thing they couldn’t really do - have the flexibility to expand as needed to handle the tasks and a budget that only handled the basic tasks with additional budgets and personnel for individual projects.