MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation

The Risks of Outsourcing IT

By Michael J. Earl

April 15, 1996

ALTHOUGH LARGE CORPORATIONS CONTINUE TO OUTSOURCE IT SERVICES, THE ISSUES OF WHETHER AND HOW TO OUTSOURCE GENERATE STRONG EMOTIONS ON the part of managers. Many practitioners and academics now argue for selective or “smart” sourcing. According to this author, this is probably a sensible approach to balance efficiency and effectiveness in providing IT services. However, the author argues that companies should first ask why they should not insource IT services. His perspective is based on an analysis of eleven risks of outsourcing that he identified in discussions with both buyers and vendors in the IT outsourcing marketplace.

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While outsourcing IT has been a trend in the 1990s, it is not a new phenomenon. For example, systems development has been sourced from outside through application packages or software houses for many years. Large facilities management contracts in the late 1980s signaled a timely convergence of supply and demand factors. On the one hand, major vendors offered facilities management and other outsourcing services. On the other hand, managers who were tired of IS budget growth year after year and sometimes elusive business benefits saw an opportunity to cut IT costs, downsize the IS function, and do to IT what they were doing in other parts of the business — subcontract. The announcement of two seemingly revolutionary outsourcing contracts — at Eastman Kodak and at General Dynamics —may have given business the confidence to take on IT outsourcing on an ever-widening scale, and the issue was established on corporate agendas.1

The objectives of outsourcing are cost cutting; a desire to focus on the business, not on IT (or on “core systems, not on the total application portfolio”); or subcontracting responsibilities for operating and maintaining legacy systems. Whatever the objective, the possibility of outsourcing tends to generate strong emotions among both IS professionals and general managers. Thus research on the myths and realities of outsourcing has been followed by “how to do it”... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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