Just came out of a very interesting round table discussion with several CIOs and Mr. Azim Premji from Wipro. In describing Wipro's core competency, Mr. Premji claimed that it was talent management. Outsourcing has moved from data center management to software development to business process outsourcing to services management. Management of services such as traditional R&D for product development and knowledge work requires talent management. This is what Wipro has developed over the years.
From the demand side, given that companies can outsource design and production, what should they protect as core? Could the core competence be the ability to dynamically allocate work? Once allocated, could the integration of work be a supporting function? This raises interesting possibilities. Companies may get work done by the same providers and differ mainly in their ability to integrate and reallocate work. Furthermore, basic research and development may be done just to build their ability to understand new developments or to simply evaluate the work done by the service providers.