Insourcing
Insourcing is the practice of carrying out work in house that has previously been contracted out to a third party.
This practice gives organisations more direct control over important projects and can be achieved in two ways.
Companies can bring in specialists as and when required to fill temporary posts or they can look for people already within the organisation who may have the potential ability to carry out the task.
Searching within an organisation can bring the short term disadvantage of needing to wait whilst the employees acquire the necessary skills to carry out the tasks they have been allocated.
For example, if a company wanted its engineers to write their own technical manuals for the equipment they had designed instead of contracting the work out to professional technical writers, it would first be necessary for the engineers to take technical writing courses at college in order to be able to complete the task successfully.
However, the long term advantage is that once the employees have received the training they need to carry out such tasks, they can continue to do so preventing the need to bring in specialists to fill temporary posts in the future.
The opposite of insourcing is outsourcing. Often work is outsourced to allow companies to concentrate on their core competencies by having aspects of business that they don’t do manage so well overseen by a third party.
