John Doucette, CIO of United Technologies, states that ‘If you're not the lowest-cost provider of that service, you need to contract it out' (Overby 2003). However, central to the Zappos business model and its success was to make insourcing decisions based on the criticality of the function to customer service.
Based on the readings in the ‘Outsourcing' section and your own experience or research of outsourcing, how viable do you think outsourcing is as a human capital strategy?
You may wish to consider one or more of the questions below in your response. These are suggestions only. You can consider other issues:
• With pressures on costs, is outsourcing inevitable?
• Does outsourcing give businesses a competitive edge?
• What needs to be done to make outsourcing successful?
• Should outsourcing always be under consideration as part of an organisation's
• strategic HR management?