The messy breakup between Sears, Roebuck and Co. and its service partner Computer Sciences Corp. this month symbolizes a new outsourcing maxim: Bigger isn't better. While the $33 billion U.S. outsourcing market is expected to grow at about a 4% clip through 2009, the size of outsourcing deals is shrinking, according to IDC and others. Instead of entering into huge, throw-everything-over-the-wall outsourcing contracts, such as the one Sears inked with CSC, corporations are signing on for smaller, more business-specific arrangements. Take the city of Chicago. It has drawn a clear line between what it will outsource to its service provider Unisys and what the city keeps in-house. "When we started, we went into it with the mind-set that the city would keep functions of architecture and design and project management of major projects in-house," says Christopher O'Brien, the city's CIO. "In terms of where the boundaries of outsourcing begin and end, that has remained fairly constant. It's not likely that we would do what some organizations have done, which is turn over their whole IT shop to an outsourcer."
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机译：西尔斯（Sears），罗巴克（Roebuck and Co.）及其服务合作伙伴计算机科学公司（Computer Sciences Corp.）之间本月的混乱合并标志着新的外包准则：更大的不是更好。 IDC等机构的数据显示，到2009年，美国330亿美元的外包市场预计将以4％的速度增长，但外包交易的规模正在缩小。公司没有签订大型的，包揽一切的外包合同（例如与Sears签订CSC协议的合同），而是签署了更小，更特定于业务的安排。以芝加哥市为例。它在将外包给服务提供商Unisys的内容与城市内部保留的内容之间划清了界限。 “当我们开始的时候，我们的思路是城市将内部主要建筑的设计和功能以及项目管理功能保持在内部，”该市的CIO Christopher O'Brien说。 “就外包边界的开始和结束位置而言，这一点一直保持不变。我们不太可能做某些组织已经做过的事情，而是将整个IT部门交给外包商。”
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