Insourcing – a new fashion trend

There is a new trend, a new fashion in the high-tech industry. They already coined the most natural term for it and it is called “insourcing”. A recent article was called “Insourcing QA to gain more control over the resources”. Yes, indeed, so outsourcing has outlived its hype by far and we need a new something for the managers to get bonuses about.

Not surprisingly, the new trend is a direct reversal of the previous trend. So, there is nothing new there really. In a decade or so we will be high on outsourcing again, so the Indians and others should just hang in there for a while and we’ll be back.

Reality is that neither outsourcing nor insourcing are the ultimate answer to anything. No magic bullet is going to cure an ineffectively managed business. The best one can do is ignore these fashions completely. Unless you are a consultant of outsourcing, of course, because now you will be consulting with equal vigour on insourcing.

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Strategic direction: security ebb

Something quite prominent happened in the security field over the last week. It is a strategic move so I am going to talk about it here rather than on Holy Hash! although it would be interesting to the security folks too.

So, what happened, you ask? Ah, nothing so spectacular that TV shows would interrupt their evening program for but so momentous that I wish they would. It all started with the little exercise at RSA Conference where a couple of so-called “security leaders” declared that security is the territory of really large companies and anyone smaller should just forget about it. I already wrote my opinion about the basic idea of ignoring risks in an area where an incident, according to Coverity, runs on average to 7 million dollars but can easily be a couple of orders of magnitude more.

It would all go away into the history unnoticed if it was not for Bruce Schneier who suddenly chipped in with his commentary that he agrees to the gentlemen in question. Now, Bruce is not stoopid and he is the head of security for BT. To explain to our full satisfaction how come that his …
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