Editorial comment.

AuthorPrickett, Ruth
PositionEditorial

September is the end of the holiday season and the start of a busy autumn for most businesses. People reappear at their desks, city roads fill up again and a rapidly fading tan is all you have to remind you of August's dog days. On the other hand, at least it means you are no longer having key conversations with out-of-office voicemail messages. Many of the people you need to speak to urgently may be able to meet you within a week and you're less likely to be chronically short-staffed if there's a sudden surge in demand. So why, when it's so great that everybody is at last corning back into the office, are so many firms packing whole divisions off to an outsourced service provider(page 18)?

Part of the answer, of course, is that smaller firms can gain access to a pool of high-quality staff in non-core operations such as HR (page 14). Definitions of "non-core", however, are shifting and the price of poorly managed outsourcing can be a loss of internal skills and reduced performance. Now the outsourcing phenomenon is reaching new areas and firms are looking further afield, even to the extent of locating call centres in other continents. Communication, for a long time the scourge of many organisations' internal systems, is therefore crucial to cross geographical boundaries and even national cultures. Like many other solutions, outsourcing can make perfect sense on paper, but has to be implemented witb great care to avoid creating its own problems.

While some organisations remain keen to outsource sections of their operations, others are busy attempting to save money by increased centralisation. The UK prison service, for example, has saved millions by re-examining its procurement...

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