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

9. Five key areas to focus on

‘Many companies fail to realize you need different skills to manage an outsourcing alliance rather than an internal IT department,’ says Andy Chesnutt of Compass, a management consultancy which questioned 8,000 firms and found 58 per cent of IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) projects failed to meet expectations.

—‘Cost-Cutting Drives Outsourcing’, IT Week, September 1 2005

Specialist section 1: Financial engineering Sudhakar Balachandran of Columbia University notes how cost accounting disciplines have migrated from manufacturing into the service economy .... As well as measuring the cash costs of providing a product or service, smart companies look at the assets tied up in the process. Such number-crunching ...