Get it Right the First Time

Outsourcing—once an obscure idea considered to be the domain of information technology professionals—has now arrived as a mainstream business strategy that is on the agenda of all senior management.

Industry analysts continue to predict explosive growth in the outsourcing marketplace—not only in the number of deals and dollars spent on the outsourcing of information technology, but, more recently, in the breadth of services outsourced, extending beyond information technology to business processes, application development and, increasingly, even to strategic business functions.

Companies outsource for a variety of reasons, including a desire to reduce costs, obtain better levels of service, improve core business focus, provide access to state-of-the-art technology and offload the less stable portions of their workforces. But how often does an outsourcing arrangement deliver on its promise? Formal statistics are difficult to come by, but the figure typically cited by industry experts