No Place Like Home

Last week Sprint Nextel pulled back in-house some work it had previously outsourced to IBM. Sprint Nextel is certainly not the first company to revisit an outsourcing decision, nor is it the last. As of Monday morning, 56 percent of Systems Management Pipeline readers responding to a poll on outsourcing decisions said their companies had recently decided to handle IT work they had previously decided to outsource themselves.Another 13 percent are in the process of reassessing their outsourcing decisions. In fact, only 31 percent said their companies would not take back any IT projects which are currently outsourced.

So is Sprint Nextel's decision a harbinger of more outsourcing reversals? My suspicion is that Sprint Nextel's decision has less to do with some mega industry trend than it does with the desire of the byproduct of two merged companies discovering that, in some cases, the efficiencies of taking on some previously outsourced IT work in-house are now greater than they were when the business was two separate companies.

Naturally, savvy businesses are constantly reevaluating their own economies of scale, and as result, reconsidering their outsourcing decisions. Thus, it makes good sense that so many of our poll respondents would be giving old outsourcing deals a second or third look