Outsourcing Revisited: Is It A Viable Strategy?

According to recent studies, two-thirds of all outsourcing programs fail to achieve the expected results. In fact some studies even suggest that this estimate is low putting the number as high as 90 percent. And this is not a new phenomenon. Industry reports and articles between 1995 and 2007 tend to suggest that little progress has been made with a strategy that appears to be long on promise but short on results. This leads to a number of questions the most important of which is simply this . . . is outsourcing a viable strategy? And if it is, why the dismal track record and, how can an organization ultimately make it work? The above are the opening comments from a show we aired last year with Phil Fersht who at the time according to AMR's Mickey North Rizza, was the firm's "Outsourcing Guru." Fersht, who has since left AMR - a firm he joined in January 2008 - to pursue his Horses for Sources vision provided some interesting insights into the reasons behind the above referenced trends. That said there is still a great deal left unanswered in terms of the practical application and enduring benefits of an outsourcing strategy. It is this practical, real-world view of outsourcing that makes today's program most interesting, as I welcome IACCM's Founder and CEO Tim Cummins and 30 year public sector veteran and author of the seminal "Towards Tesco" paper Colin Cram, to talk about outsourcing from the client perspective.