This category can act in a number of different ways when interacting with a business. When brought in for a small project or a single technological issue they are normally thought of as a consultancy – providing expertise and advice around a single issue or set of issues. Outsourcing can also mean using the provider as a replacement for the entire IT department allowing a company to exist without any IT staff of their own. And there is a lot of middle ground where the IT Outsourcer might be brought in only to handle specific roles within the larger IT organization such as only running and manning the help desk, only doing network engineering or providing continuous management and oversight but not doing hands on technical work. IT Outsources are very hard to define because they are so flexible and can exist in so many different ways. Each IT Outsourcer is unique as is, in most cases, every client engagement.