Many companies are in a position of choosing whether or not to outsource.

In many cases outsourcing is the practice of using outside firms to handle work that was either normally performed within a company or a company does not have the ability to deal with certain parts of the work on its premises.  For instance, a very common service to outsource, particularly if a company is small and is not set up with large spaces to house office desk booths or the salaries of a large sales force, is to outsource telemarketing / telesales.

A telemarketing team is a specialized team that is fully equipped with headsets, scripts and housed mainly in large booth style office desk environments, the overhead of which means that you would constantly need to have a reason to pay a full time salary to justify the service.  Many smaller companies do not have the money to pay full time salaries or afford the space or office furniture to justify this support in-house so outsourcing makes sense.

Now in some cases some of the services companies will outsource could mean that you could be dealing with people sat an office desk half way around the world.  This is commonplace in banking, travel and computer service industries.

A basic rule is that for straightforward and mundane tasks outsourcing can make better sense.   An example of this maybe that to have a highly train and valuable accountant sat for days on end  at an office desk doing tax returns – this is a bad use of their time so tax returns maybe better outsourced to an accountancy firm