Insourcing and outsourcing: two sides to the same coin?
The tech media, analysts and bloggers love a catchy title, and of late there are several stories with the ‘I’ word trying to generate some eyeballs. Just a couple of recent titles.
- India firm's 'in-sourcing' creates jobs for Georgia says The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Same story, with a different title: The inevitable: Wipro outsourcing software jobs to US is the title of a recent InfoWorld blog entry. Remember about 4 years ago when everyone was going bonkers over outsourcing and the impact on the US economy? NPR is reporting that Indian software firm Wipro plans to open a software design center in Atlanta and expects to hire around 500 computer programmers in the next three years. That certainly didn't take very long.
- Infosys tries out ‘insourced’ staff says a Financial Times article, adding Infosys Technologies will on Friday dispatch its first group of UK graduate trainees to India for a six-month induction course as part of efforts by the country’s outsourcing companies to make their workforce more global.
The 25 trainees, each of whom has been issued with a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to India to help them orientate themselves in their new home, were hired from 12 UK universities as part of the programme, which follows a similar scheme in place for US graduates.
Now, though the titles are catchy, the articles don't really seem to be talking about Insourcing [as volunteers at Wikipedia would like to define it. Insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing; that is insourcing (or contracting in) is often defined as the delegation of operations or jobs from production within a business to an internal (but 'stand-alone') entity (such as a subcontractor) that specializes in that operation. Insourcing is a business decision that is often made to maintain control of certain critical production or competencies.
And as an observer of sourcing, this is a trend I am inclined to keenly observe. And yes, there are certainly instances of Insourcing that we have been experiencing, and have even facilitated… more in my next entry.
