
Today’s knowledge and service-based economy offers innumerable opportunities for well-run companies to increase profits through strategic outsourcing.1 Emphasis is rapidly shifting from outsourcing parts, componentry, and hardware subsystems toward the even greater unexploited potentials that intellectually-based systems offer:2
- Obtaining higher value, more flexible, and more integrated services than internal sources can offer.
- Improving the company’s capacities to stay current and to innovate by interacting with “best in world” knowledge sources.
- Achieving cross-divisional coordination and shareholder value gains that the company — for internal structural or political reasons — could not otherwise achieve.
Outsourcing Knowledge-Based Services
The drivers for these trends are formidable. As the service sector has grown to embrace 80 percent of all U.S. employment, specialized service firms have become very large and sophisticated relative to the scale and expertise that individual staff and service groups have within integrated companies — whether in services or manufacturing (see Table 1).
These specialists can develop greater knowledge depth, invest more in software and training systems, be more efficient, and hence offer higher wages and attract more highly trained people than can the individual staff groups of all but a few integrated companies. Given this greater knowledge depth and wider range of customer interactions, they... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Get a premium subscription today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
More Info.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article as a PDF.
Subscribe today to read the most recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
Upgrade to premium
Current Subscribers: Do you subscribe to MIT Sloan Management Review? Register for online access.
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription—access to the entire archive of articles.