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Private enterprise exists to make money, not provide goods or services.

This is my major beef[1] with outsourcing - it takes x number of people to do any particular job and outsourcing promises to do the job with x-10. Which sounds *really* attractive to the beancounters that run most businesses (including public bodies) because most of them only see the world through the perspective of cost and not value.

However, as we know, those x-10 resource-units tend to be time-shared from a central pool and lack any great degree of site & institutional knowledge - which makes them about as useful as a chocolate teapot for the first 3-6 months until they learn about the client systems and methods. And then (being in the stressful use-them-up-and-throw-them-away culture that seems to pervade most outsource companies) they leave and the whole sorry cycle starts again. And lets not forget that, on each of those people, you need to pay the outsourcers 30% (or, in most cases, 10%) profit margin. Although, most of the contracts I've been exposed to, the outsourcer has underbid and will be hoping to improve profits by charging bogus 'project' costs whenever asked to do anything that diverges from a standard request. And they seem very, very good at finding loopholes..

This is one of the reasons why we bought a lot of the functions back in-house at the last round. Those X people might cost more on a ledger (after all, real people have extra costs like pensions and annual leave that outsource drones don't have) but they offer far more value because they know the archtitecture, systems and culture of the organisation.

[1] I have many, many more but if I typed them all out we'd be here until Christmas..