Outsourcing is all the rage today5. In a world run by bookkeepers, the outsourcing firm has many advantages over the internal training organization. In the first place, they will have a great deal of experience working with a variety of different training programs. They can amortize the costs of providing high-technology solutions across many different clients, so that their unit cost to any one customer for any one project is much smaller than for an internal department. They will also have developed a broad range of metrics and evaluation strategies and will be able to provide impressive statistics to prove that their economies are not paid for by any collateral damage to the company.
In order to compete with this kind of marketing machine, the internal training department must diversity both in terms of offerings and in terms of processes. If the internal training department already provides the flexibility and economy that the outsourcing firm promises, there is less incentive for the business to switch from a proven performer to a promised one. If the internal training department diversifies to provide full performance improvement services to the business, then the training deliverables portion is only a small segment of their value to the organization. The other performance enhancements they provide, such as analysis, are intrinsically internal core competencies of an organization. Having a flexible and powerful XML content management system allows the performance improvement organization to offer a wide variety of blended solutions to different performance problems. The kind of responsiveness and flexibility offered to the business is much harder for the outsourcing firm to provide, or even promise.