Dear Readers,

Outsourcing has not always been regarded warmly by businesses or indeed by their employees. Often associated with cost-cutting and redundancies, outsourcing has not benefited from being mistakenly conflated with offshoring, whereby processes are shifted to low-cost markets overseas.

This negative image was illustrated by a survey published by the National Outsourcing Association (NOA), which­­ found that 22 per cent of people cited outsourcing as a profession they dislike.