As organizations are realizing the ROI (return on investment) is sometimes not theyre when it comes to outsourcing your services, companies are re-evaluating their strategy. When you outsource services, it is usually non-core business activities such as IT, HR, Support. Most consulting firms such as IBM usually impose a certain process and methodology but most important you lose control and your agility on speed and business agility. In the saturday paper of the NY Times, insourcing has been on the rise this year as outsourcing services especially in technology has fallen by 30% this year some of the reasons cited was quality, rigid outsourcing processes and failed to return the savings promised.

Create a business case and be conservative with your numbers, understand the value of outsourcing and the impacts it will cause on your agility to deliver and your control of business change . Perform a Delta analysis of your company to help you analyze both options. Leverage R&D and government credits for the insourcing option.

Last thing when you outsource certain technologies your innovation may suffer, difficult decisions need to be analyzed and it some cases outsourcing is the right answer, just be careful and position this option with your vision and strategy. Most large consulting firms will start offering SAAS for their ERP, in my opinion this option will not make sense for most corporations since it will limit functionality by specific industry for them to leverage a one size fits all model. These integrated ERP systems have become the central nervous systems for most organizations and hard to transform back into a one size fits all model without impacting your business.