Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief Article

Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility. By Linda Cohen and Allie Young. Harvard Business School Press, 243 pages. $35.

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As Linda Cohen and Allie Young see it, too many companies have an ad hoc, "where can I save?" approach to sourcing that isn't woven into their strategic planning and may even appear--in their words--chaotic and compulsive.

"Companies enter contracts without integrated planning, strategy and management--leading to wasted efforts and misplaced dollars due to miscommunication, misalignment and poor governance," they write. Instead, they propose a more holistic framework they call "multisourcing," which includes outsourcing as well as internal resources, in which services "are blended seamlessly, governed closely and evaluated continuously for effectiveness and efficiency."

That's probably a paradigm few companies could ever reach, though it certainly seems worth aspiring to. But Cohen and Young, executives at Gartner Research who have consulted extensively with companies...