What is Outsourcing?
I accidently skipped over this, so a quick rewind to define outsourcing. I decided to outsource this to Wikipedia, you can see their definition below:
“Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm or making better use of time and energy costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of land, labor, capital, (information) technology and resources. Outsourcing became part of the business lexicon during the 1980s. It is essentially a division of labour.” www.wikipedia.org
A little too convoluted to be useful for our purposes but a thorough definition I think you’ll agree… it would make a lovely quote in an MBA essay or if we were putting together a textbook…
This is part of the problem with understanding outsourcing for small business. A great deal of the popular media still describes it in terms of its government or corporate function. It’s all very 1990s 
It conjures images of 10 000 page service agreements, teams of lawyers negotiating the smallest details of who’s responsible for what, where, when and how much. Read the rest of this entry