Outsourcing Dilemma: The Search for Competitiveness, The

What are your main reasons for outsourcing?

One of the first tasks facing the management team of an organization embarking on an outsourcing project is to establish what it wants from the arrangement. These days most managers are familiar with the three basic reasons for outsourcing put forward by the management gurus:

• the desire to concentrate on core activities;

• the need to improve the service; and

• the often pressing need to reduce the cost.

Virtually all the initial approaches to service providers concentrate on these three points and consequently receive little attention unless the potential client explains them in a convincing way. More importantly, an assumption that the reasons are well known and obvious may mean that the client management ...