What Do We Make of This?

This example is real, and it’s working. The benefits have been documented by the National Audit Office of the UK government, so they are less subject to managerial puffery than most stories of this sort. This is not the only example of transformational outsourcing, but it is one of the best. It was executed well, but not perfectly. Nonetheless, by any measure we would choose, the results are unusually good.

Why is this so important? More than half of the business executives we talk to expect their companies to require radical change to succeed over the coming years.^[2] The approaches most have used in the past to implement changes of this sort have been stunningly ineffective. As we will discuss throughout the remainder of the book, transformational outsourcing provides an alternative that actually works.

^[2]Unpublished Accenture survey, conducted in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2002.