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

Internal v. external sourcing

Having decided on its strategic objectives and on which capabilities it is prepared to contemplate externalizing, the board has a wide range of different approaches and structures to choose from, each providing a different balance of shareholder value and risk – as illustrated in the ‘alliance framework’ in Figure 1.1. While considering these, the board also needs to go through a further process: understanding what will be involved in making the required cultural change at the relevant level – be it within a business unit or across the entire company. In the case of a business unit, it might seem that if the unit were capable of making the required change itself, then it would already have done so. But if time or ...