There are times when an organization cannot handle its increasing work load. There are a number of ways to handle this situation. You can increase your work force, merge with a larger organization or you can share the workload. Increasing the work force can be a very tedious job. It would involve increasing office space and day to day resources as well. Every merger comes with strings and not everyone likes to be tied down. They say, ‘sharing is caring.’ So let’s look at two ways that enable organizations to share the workload. ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘off shoring’, though the concepts have been around since the 1980’s, it was only after the 2004 U.S Elections that ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘Off shoring’ became terms of everyday usage.

Technically the terms have very different meanings but they are used interchangeably. Outsourcing is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, whereas Off Shoring is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, outside the country. The advantage of doing this is that companies can save on costs. The main contribution to cost effectiveness is the gap in the wages of developed and developing countries. The world today has become a global economy. We are all so interconnected, that the growth in any one economy will have a positive effect on every other economy in the world. On the other hand, the fall of an economy can have disastrous global consequences. Case and point: the current recession.

Call it ‘outsourcing’, ‘off shoring’, ‘near shoring’ or anything else; the fact remains that sharing resources, responsibilities and liabilities, is in everyone’s best interest. The sheer volume of work load being outsourced, is an indicator of the effectiveness of ‘outsourcing’. Be it in business, or in personal relationships, we all function on one basic agreement. ‘You do your part and ill do mine.’