Randall S. Becker

As the CIO of your company, your careful planning enables you to successfully manage the ongoing costs of the physical technological infrastructure (e.g. computers, networks). For months or even years, however, you have watched software development budgets mount while user satisfaction drops, and you're having trouble reconciling the two. Outsourcing worked for a while, during the financial and Enterprise Resource Planning system implementations, but it's not working now that development has branched into custom solutions to capitalize on your wisdom of how your business functions. Now your company is going to change one or more key subsystems, and this time the development work is going to be done in-house. This is known as back-sourcing, and it is a growing trend within companies whose primary business is not the development of software. This article lays out some of the key issues you must address to take advantage of this trend.