Pendulum Swings Back: Insource Your IT To Save Money

from the and-so-it-goes... dept

It's kinda funny how various "trends" in IT get taken so far that they reach the point where finally people realize the extreme might not have made sense. For years, "outsourcing" was all the rage and it made a few companies an awful lot of money. While many warned that outsourcing something as critical as IT could lead to unintended consequences, many execs swallowed the kool-aid and did deals without thinking through all of the consequences. This isn't to say outsourcing IT never works. In many cases, it does. But it seemed to be taken to such an extreme that that you knew eventually the pendulum would swing back the other way.

So here we are with articles popping up about how a company has saved millions of dollars by "insourcing" its IT and taking it back from an outsourced provider. Of course, the more cynical among you might suggest that the trend towards outsourcing was pushed mainly by consultants who made their money making those deals work -- and the trend in the other direction may be equally pushed by those same consultants looking for new business. The real story, of course, is that depending on the business and what a company is trying to do, there are always pros and cons to outsourcing or keeping IT in-house, but the claims of miraculous savings in either direction tend to overstate the benefits while ignoring the downsides.

Filed Under: insourcing, outsourcing