Outsourcing Development

In today's increasingly competitive environment, organizations are focusing on their core business activities - putting their resources into processes that contribute directly to the "bottom-line". Activities and processes which do not contribute directly to the profitability are delegated to third parties - business process outsourcing.

The creation of computer solutions capable of supporting the business activities of an organization is not a core activity for most organizations. Systems development is amongst the activities which have been the target of outsourcing arrangements for a considerable time (The Myths and Realities of Offshore Services, Gartner Group, June 2004) - although often with mixed results. In general, though, these arrangements have been successful enough that the practice is expanding rapidly to cover many new areas of process beyond simple systems development.

Today, outsourcing is being pushed even further. Not only are processes being outsourced, but they are being outsourced overseas. Access to relatively inexpensive yet high-speed communications and the use of service-oriented architectures have made offshore outsourcing a viable reality.