Outsourcing in Australia

This paper reports on data pertaining to outsourcing collected from a survey administered in 2002 in Australia. The underlying assumption was that outsourcing is becoming popular for sound business reasons such as economies of scale and enabling executives to concentrate on core business activities. This paper explores the outsourcing decision (to outsource, not to outsource, or to discontinue outsourcing), especially reasons for (not) outsourcing. Most of the reasons have been anticipated in the literature. The strongest group of reasons (termed "Operational") pertained to cost savings and improving performance, but outsourcing is also used to access skills and resources not available in-house. The most important impediment to outsourcing was ascertaining relevant costs, and formulating and quantifying requirements. We describe the methodology, report findings and allude to future research.