There is a trend towards bringing some IT jobs that were once being outsourced back in-house and the number of H-1b visa bearing engineers and developers is slowing down. Part of this is because the kind of innovative talent needed for many companies to move their tech forward seems to be here, not in countries who have focused education on more mundane pursuits.
For many companies it is a matter of using your best IT and development personnel to do the most important work, and leaving more day-to-day maintenance and operational support to lower cost outsourced personnel.
“Hybrid-SourcingTM” requires a certain amount of balance and using your higher paid internal expertise to do simple day-to-day management, low level support and other “busy work” is not a strategy that will give you the best return on your investment in them.
Although most analysts have expressed how the trend throughout 2013 was the “reshoring” of formerly offshore outsourced IT services, GM was held up as the first to do this last year, but as the year progressed it did not result in a deluge of firms returning outsourced work to internal personnel.
More companies have chosen to balance their IT resources by using a hybrid model that combines insourcing with outsourcing. If you look at the economics of your IT operation, as these companies did, you may find that what is needed is a balance between two or more of these approaches in order to get the maximum return on your IT investment.
Offshoring, reshoring, onshoring, nearshoring, insourcing, and outsourcing, with so many different choices Hybrid-Sourcing helps you to evaluate each option and choose the combinations that give you the best results.
Hybrid-Sourcing allows you to use your higher paid internal resources for projects and tasks that maximize their experience, skill and knowledge of your company, to give you more impact from these generally higher paid internal resources. Hybrid-Sourcing is directly tied to business goals and is specific to each company — meaning there is no cookie-cutter approach to determining what combination of sourcing models will work best for your company. Insourcing might work for some tasks and outsourcing for others.
This type of hybrid model works often with offshore outsourced personnel taking on those responsibilities that require competence yet not necessarily providing higher level business or technology innovation. Your internal IT investment can be then focused on innovation and the critical revenue generating aspects now common in many IT departments.
The fact that you can keep your internal experts focused on the critical aspects of your mission will maximize their contribution to your business success. As most outsourcing services also feature far lower hourly rates to utilize a more than acceptable level of competence, your less mission critical support tasks still get done but at a lower cost. This too helps to increase the return on your entire IT investment.
The kitchen is heating up for IT and it gets hotter every day. Considering how to get your resources in balance rather than just bringing it all home may be in your best interest. With as many companies that are following this model…you’ll be in good company.
Author’s Note: This is an article written for a client in the IT and Application Development industry.
