Shocker: Outsourcing Often Not So Good For Companies

from the yeah,-like-we-couldn't-see-that-coming dept

We've been accused a few times of being supporters of outsourcing (offshore or not), which isn't particularly accurate. From the very beginning of the hype surrounding outsourcing, we've said repeatedly that outsourcing is very often a bad decision for a few reasons. First, it's often not about fixing problems, but about moving problems somewhere else -- which often makes them worse, because you have less control over them. Second, moving core services outside of your control can give the company less flexibility down the road. Also, we'd been hearing all sorts of reports (especially with offshoring) about how it paralyzed decision making. With the time difference you had a "one decision per day" system, since each move would have to bounce around the globe. It appears that new studies are supporting this, pointing out that many companies that go with outsourced solutions regret it. They don't save any money, the quality goes down and there are various other problems created by outsourcing. Of course, that said, there's still no reason to put protectionist measures in place. If companies want to make bad decisions -- that's for their management to decide to do. There certainly are some situations where outsourcing and offshoring do make sense, but the mass hysteria on both the pro and con side over the past couple of years has clearly been overblown.