Offshore Outsourcing: It Just Is - Learn to Live With It

Offshore business process and IT outsourcing is a manifestation of an ongoing economic evolution of how organizations compete. Organizations are narrowing their focus and using third parties to perform a broader range of activities, assembling distributed best-of-breed teams to compete. It has been going on for centuries. It will not go away. It cannot be effectively outlawed. It will always create losers. Most organizations undertaking it can do a much better job addressing its by-products (e.g, laid-off workers) and perform better. Governments can do a better job addressing it holistically rather than either ignoring it or attempting to ban it. All relevant parties should focus on learning to play better by the economic rules of the game rather than "tilting against windmills" and trying to change them.

META Group originally published this article on 3 March 2004.