A colleague told me about an outsourcing firm which refuses to adopt SaaS for internal operations because they do not external eyes having access to their data. The irony is seemingly lost on them that their own staff can eye data of hundreds of their customers!
And not sure they realize a trend I saw in my book research. I asked several companies working on smart products for their industries if they would consider outsourcing some of the development. The answers were fascinating. Several said some variations of “who knows our industry, our customers and our products better than us?” Others said “If we bring in an outsourcer, it is almost guaranteed our competition will have our IP in two years”
Thousands of thick contracts later, this is a bad omen for the outsourcing industry. Getting back into De Niro’s Circle of Trust – Regaining trust of the industry’s customers, and as importantly in its suppliers, needs to be a major objective.
(Read this and other articles @ Deal Architect)
They have a point on the customer aspect Vinnie. Outsourcing only makes sense for well described repetitive work. In theory they could outsource dev if their design were 100% complete and contained all business rules as well as exceptions, including how to exactly handle each.
However, last time I checked, such dev work is rather Agile (cough) meaning that there is a continuous parallel process of business consulting going on, feeding into dev
And this will never change a lot. The closer to the end-user or customer, the higher the required specialised customer knowledge and personal skills. And that, my friend, is something outresources (just invented that word) will never manage. And they shouldn’t – it’s downright silly to want to outsource everything