Here's the problem, though: Who is capable of doing the due diligence? By outsourcing, you end up losing a lot of the in-house knowledge necessary to spot problems early on.
Even if they're everybodies favorite wipping boy right now. I'd enter Nokia as the winner in the due dilligence category.
There's a classic business case study about two handset manufacturers, a Philips fab in Mexico and a small fire in that fab. Details can be found here :
In light of Nokia's latest struggle with iOS and Android, aren't they both a success story and a cautionary tale for due diligence and proactive management. Nokia had a second fire-- a burning platform.
By the logic of the book excerpt that I finally had time to read, they should have read the tea leaves about the iOS and Android universes much quicker than they did. Nokia's burning platform memo would not have been so dire if their response had occurred one year earlier. Nokia was already considerably left behind by the application universe at that point. iOS had momentum then and should have been considered a direct threat even though the Android userbase was only 1/10th of the size it is now.
I still find that corporate cultures tend to sideline Android to this day because they underestimate the value of an open platform on commodity hardware with infinite hackability that intrigues developers. The same incredible growth occurred with Linux and Apache on the web as the 888% Android growth in the last year. Android will win partly for the same reason Microsoft beat Apple's superior UI in the 80s and 90s-- Apple is still tied to expensive proprietary hardware and the need to completely control their platform.
That's not necessarily true; systems integration is a skill in its own right. It's just about what level of abstraction you work at. As software people we ought to understand this better than anyone.
You can hire those pre-experienced in that from your vendors. This happens tonnes in industry; if you want a well-paid senior networking job, get a low-paying entry-level job in Cisco TAC and wait to be poached...
The implication here is that outsourcing is for companies with good processes and solid culture. On the other hand, it could be quite a bad move for a dysfunctional company. I could see many ways outsourcing would actually amplify dysfunctions.
