Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

1. Clear deal and strategy alignment

Outsourcing just to cut costs is not good for industry – you need profits to grow and provide quality.

—Bruce M Caldwell, principal analyst at Gartner, from ‘Outward Bound’, Chief Executive Officer Magazine

If you look behind the high emotion, union confrontations and lurid headlines often associated with outsourcing, the fact is that the CEOs of most large companies – and their boards – regard outsourcing primarily as a tactical solution to a corporate need for immediate cost reduction. And the cost pressure in question is invariably related to a specific issue, reporting deadline or target that their business is struggling or failing to meet.

In other words, outsourcing comes on to the agenda because of ...