Multisourcing

Okay, open up your business jargon notebooks. The newest book-selling-buzzword is "multisourcing," which is the name of the new book by Gartner Analyst Linda Cohen. Cohen addressed Symposium ITxpo with a command to stop outsourcing immediately.

Gartner analyst Linda Cohen started off her presentation at Symposium ITxpo with a command for the audience of 6,000 attendees: "You have to stop outsourcing now." She said that the chaos created by compulsive outsourcing is making it harder to produce results. Her point is that too many companies have taken outsourcing to an extreme, heading offshore because it's faddish, juggling multiple contracts with incompetence and lacking sufficient governance discipline.

The linked article above also includes a list of eight myths related to outsourcing. I'm not going to get in to how the article reads like a press release for the book itself, ZD News will have to live with itself for that. However, back when so-called "journalists" were publishing articles about the horrible human tragedy known as outsourcing, I thought there were more compelling reasons not to outsource (see Outsourcing Heart Strings).

I haven't read Cohen's book and I probably will. The high-level points made in the quote above are valid. However, the point is not about not outsourcing nor is it about "multisourcing". To make those decisions, business management must first decide on a solid business model and then determine how to make that model run like a finely-tuned instrument; this is not a new concept.

I'm just wondering if most company decision-makers need to be spoon-fed a diet of buzzwords and repackaged fundamentals, or if these types of books are created to make the old seem new to keep the business book market active. Granted, I'm sure there is a lot of compelling new research from Gartner included. I will reserve judgement until I read it. But if I saw that there were valid business reasons for not outsourcing more than a year ago, then why is the business press only covering it now? Maybe because instead of researching back then, journalists just wanted crocodile tears. Now that Cohen has done the leg work for the media, the real story can be told.

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