Outsourcing and Knowledge Management

by Ken Orr

Whether one likes it or not, outsourcing in all (or most of) its forms is here to stay. For decades, large organizations have been outsourcing all or part of their manufacturing operations. Many of those same organizations have been adopting IT outsourcing strategies as well, first with domestic systems integrators (like EDS, CSC, and IBM) and more recently with offshore organizations (for example, Tata and Wipro). While statistics suggest that only a relatively small percentage of total North American IT work is currently done via outsourcing, the practice is becoming more common each year.