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Outsourcing is not a problem; in this context, it is simply the misuse of a term.

Unless they are totally self-sufficient, everybody outsources. It doesn't matter whether we are at home or in business, we all do it most days of the year. Want some examples?

If you keep chickens in your back yard, feed and water them, house them and care for them, then daily collect sufficient eggs from them for your needs, you are self-sufficient in eggs. If however, like the vast majority of consumers, you go to your local supermarket and buy a dozen eggs in a package when you need them, you have obtained your eggs via an outsource process. You have devolved the need for keeping chickens yourself to a specialist company that keeps millions of chickens, feeds and waters them, houses them and cares for them, then collects all of the eggs from those chickens, packages them in convenient quantities and ships them to your local store ready for you to purchase on demand.

Ah, semantics I hear you say! In fact, I bet you have opened your e-mail application already, and started typing a response on your PC's keyboard. Nice PC is it? Build it yourself did you? No? Well then, you outsourced it didn't you?

Is that e-mail ready? Just pressing the send button now, eh? How is the e-mail getting to me? OK, via your Internet Service Provider. And what exactly are they? A Company that provides the means for all of your e-mails to be sent to, and received from, other people. An outsourcer then, unless of course you have your own servers, and have made supply agreements with a telecoms provider to enable you to transmit data through their network equipment, and so on. I think you get the picture.

Outsourcing is nothing more than commerce itself. It is as essential to a Western economy as air for the workers to breathe. So the debate is not about whether we should outsource, but where we should outsource from, and when. Those questions beg a different set of answers, some of which are sensible and moral, others that open a whole new can-of-worms in areas of discrimination and envy.

Should your Company outsource a function that will cost you less if you take on an external supplier who can give you either the same standard of service for less cost, or a better standard of service for the same cost?

Absolutely not, you should take on an external supplier only if they can give you both. If you can get a better standard of service for less cost, then

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