What is outsourcing?
Building a business used to be all about ownership. In order to guarantee access to the skills, knowledge and assets necessary to deliver a given product or service, you had own or employ them. And the more you owned, the more control you had over your business.
Today, it's a different story. Volatile markets, increasingly specialised skills and ever-changing technologies increasingly call the ownership model into question. So businesses started contracting-out recurring internal activities to external suppliers: and outsourcing was born. All the manpower, equipment and facilities to properly perform the outsourced activity were provided by someone else, so companies were free to invest more in the 'vital organs' of their business. And because external companies were doing work previous done by employees, responsibilities were in black and white - rather than clouded by office politics.
But while outsourcing's rise has been based on efficiency, a closer look at outsourcing reveals that its real potential goes much further. For example, turning fixed costs into variable ones may be good for the balance sheet: but turning bosses into clients is great for quality. Allowing the company to react faster to opportunities and challenges is one thing. Allowing the company to pursue entirely new challenges or markets is another. And this is the true power of ICT sourcing: being able to set business objectives for your ICT.
"You first have to see the objectives. Then you have to reach them."
