I think a lot of us, working in pretty much any large industry, have seen what happens when outsourcing goes wrong. Which is of course not to say that it
always goes wrong, but, well, it often does.
The typical way it goes is:
- the board has heard that outsourcing can save them millions, and that "everyone is doing it"
- the business signs a big contract with the likes of TCS, Capgemini, Cognizant, etc, paying peanuts
- over the next few years, it's absolute mayhem, and customers and internal users alike are not happy. Internal tech projects and upgrades fail spectacularly, and there is downtime across the everything
- and now answering your question: the board will never place the blame on the decision to outsource, because they made that decision. The business has spent so much money and burned so many bridges in the process, that it may be impossible to go back
I've worked in enterprise-scale companies for 20 years, and for a good chunk of that, I've seen several outsourcing horror stories unfold before my eyes. I've also led teams of offshore developers, and led cross-global teams including offshore workers. I've seen both good and bad.
IME, there are 2 types of outsourcing that companies do. First is wholesale outsourcing of all IT operations - service desk, networking, workplace services etc, and often also including "staff augmentation" for small software projects. I have seen this with Capgemini, Cognizant and TCS, and I've never seen a good outcome from this style of outsourcing. The way it works is that the business pays peanuts, and they get offshore workers who are (largely) completely incompetent - the number of times I've come across networking (or whatever) "specialists" who barely know which way to hold a mouse is truely frightening (I swear I'm not exaggerating). I literally have no idea how the big firms keep getting away with this.
The other style I've seen is consultancy, where TCS, Cognizant, Capgemini or whoever is engaged for 1-2 years to build a specific system. We all know these invariably go horribly wrong when it's a government that's the customer, but I've largely seen these as successful within the enterprise. The offshore personnel assigned to projects tends to be a mix - you'll have a core of competent architects, designers and developers, a few barely mediocre developers, with a supporting cast of totally incompetent developers who have literally no idea what they are doing. These projects are usually ran pretty well, with good engagement with the business. The core of competent people do all the work, with the mediocre ones taking days to complete hours of work, and the incompetent people are basically ignored - it's weird, the customer pays for them, but at best they do nothing.
Oh, there is a third style too, very rarely seen in the enterprise space - shop around and find a small offshore business specialising in software development. I've had great success when I've pushed for this style in the past, with offshore devs in India and China.