Read any case study and you’ll probably encounter overblown statistics that say offshore outsourcing reduced costs by 50 per cent, reduced number of defects in production by 25 per cent, reduced time to launch application by 40 per cent and so on.
Some even go a step further and extrapolate these figures to ‘business value’. Example: launch time reduced by 10 weeks implies 10 weeks of additional revenue or reduced costs. So 10 divided by 52, then multiplied by annual revenues or IT annual spend equals business value from reduced launch time. Lo and behold – suddenly you have a number in the tens of millions. Add up all the other sources of value and you may reach hundreds of millions and even billions as the business value. Sounds good, right? Especially in this time of recessionary woes.
