Digital Shift & Accelerated Disruption. Episode 1: IT outsourcing or in-house development, the battle.
The big trend in the 1990’s and 2000’s for companies was to outsource their IT, as IT was considered by lots of companies as a cost center. Often, IT teams were thus attached to the Chief Finance Officer as a “support” function for the company. Outsourcing IT meant that companies and C-suite didn’t have to bother any more to manage people and technical issues that sound like coming from Mars to them, they just had to follow the bottom line in the budget. But by adopting this approach, they lost any chance to master their systems and identify how to generate value from their systems instead of just considering them as expenditures. Companies that chose to follow this path clearly missed out the technological revolution and opportunities to create value from the use of technologies itself in the past few years. So companies should take a step back and think about their strategy of outsourcing or developing in-house, not only with a cost approach (which is all the more often incomplete because of hidden associate costs).
