- Organizations often spend years hesitating about outsourcing ICT, leading to the departure of skilled staff and eventual forced outsourcing after failures.
- A quick, deliberate decision using clear criteria is crucial to avoid prolonged drama and retain core capabilities.
- Three key criteria for deciding whether to keep a task in-house: its importance to the business, its role in future innovation, and the difficulty of doing it well.
- Examples like SIDN (.NL domain) show that core competencies directly tied to an organization's mission should stay in-house, while non-core tasks like catering are better outsourced.
- Prolonged indecision destroys morale, drives away top talent, and ultimately leads to reactive outsourcing, which is a poor choice.
- An ideal solution is a small, elite in-house tech team handling critical systems while outsourcing non-core functions, but this is hard to achieve after years of conflict.
- Organizations that have outsourced too much can become 'master outsourcers' (like Odido) but must fully commit and still require skilled personnel for oversight.