Gartner: Stop Outsourcing Now

WM

some topic drift ... when i was an undergraduate ... i got con'ed into teaching a one week computer clbutt during spring break ... to the technical staff of the newly formed BCS. during summer break, i was hired as full-time boeing employee (for the duration of the summer) to help with the organization and operation of BCS (behing a full time employee, i got to park in the management parking lot at boeing hdqtrs just off boeing field). That summer, serial 003 747 was flying in the skys overhead as part of flight certification.

i remember going thru sales pitch and mock up of 747. one of the lines that stuck in my mind was that 747 would be carrying so many people that airports would ALWAYS use at least four jetways (two on each side) ... to avoid pbuttenger congestion getting on and off.

part of the current issue is that IT is being used for a wide variety of purposes ... from trivial word processing to integral part of business decision making. outsourcing has supposedly been acceptable for commodity operations that don't actually provide any business compebreastive advantage. one confusion factor may be understanding what parts of IT are just commodity operations that provide no compebreastive advantage and which parts of IT are actually fundamental to the core business uniqueness.

one of my offspring had a co-op job when he was going to school at an air freight forwarding company (he answered phones and took freight orders ... he had to memorize most of the airport 3letter codes and frieght dimenisons sizes for most of the flying planes). one of the things they also handled was aog (not oag, official airline guide, aog ... airline on ground) for replacement equipment. typically parts were air freighted to the airport with the plane on the ground ... but periodically it required physical cuourier of the part to some place in the world. they had converted to emailing the equipment invoices to the part depot (instead of physical paper). during one of the past internet virus outbreaks, their email was offline for several days ... and they had to try to find real paper invoice forms and physically carriering the invoice to the part depot. it was quite traumatic.

one could claim that a large part of business communication has now been outsourced to the internet ... w-o necessarily understanding all the implications.

and of course, i could finish w-o mentioning my favorite compebreastive business subjects ... john boyd ... collection of my past posts

and numerous other boyd pages from around the web

sample from above: Strategy