Outsourcing strategies: opportunities and risks

摘要

A characteristic of corporate strategy in developed countries in the last 20 years has been an increasing interest in outsourcing as a potential source of competitiveness and value creation. The earliest outsourcing strategies were largely driven by the desire to lower costs in the face of intensifying global competition, typically by moving low-skilled, labor-intensive, activities offshore to South-East Asia and other low cost locations. In more recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the potential of outsourcing to support a range of strategies beyond that of lower cost. Corporate strategists may not be fully familiar with four of the most promising opportunities for using outsourcing strategies - focus, scale without mass, disruptive innovation, and strategic repositioning. While assessing the potential of these opportunities in specific corporate situations, strategists also need to look at two of the most significant associated risks - the risk of losing skills that could be key to competing in the future, and the risk of turning to outsourcing at the wrong stage in an industry's evolution. My goal is to widen managers' views of the strategic alternatives that outsourcing can be used to support, while making managers aware of the main risks to be weighed in the balance.