Quelle: CIO Asia

It's an old puzzle: How much of your company's work could be done bysomebody else? The fashionable answer is, plenty - so we're going tooutsource. And that, too often, is the wrong answer.

The question no one seems to be asking is whether an outsourcingpartnership always makes sense. Sure, the Internet has helped toreduce inter-company transaction costs dramatically. But few wouldadmit that they outsource just to save a buck. Typically a deeperrationale is at work - it goes by the term "specialisation".

According to this theory, if a company can concentrate all of itsinvestment and energy on the one thing it does best and hand offeverything else to partners, it can achieve unprecedented levels ofefficiency, speed and quality. That one thing - the corecompetence - can be almost anything, from brand management to productdesign.

Given how the concept of core competence dovetails with Internettechnology, it's no surprise that so many tech gurus fervently promoteradical visions of corporate specialisation. Soon, we're told,individual companies will cease to exist - replaced by vaunted"business webs," or "econets," or "e-cologies."