Offshoring vs Outsourcing vs Smartshoring

As the offshoring trend continues to evolve, organizations have gotten smarter about the realities, expectations and limitations around offshoring.  While the "offshoring" marketing buzz is still used freely, the more appropriate terminology for this evolving trend is "smartshoring".   

Smarter organizations have realized the limitations around offshoring and have developed some finer and stricter controls around what belongs onshore vs offshore.  Smartshoring also involves infrastructure management and sharing across global sites where security, costs, reliability, availability and collaboration are all factors that need to be considered and designed appropriately.  With global collaboration, smarter infrastructures have to be deployed to provide reliable communication and across multiple sites.   

The traditional development only offshoring has evolved into organizations with all functions being offshored including Sales, Product Management, Marketing, Quality Assurance, HR, Accounting, Support and Legal.  With all these functions collaborating globally, the only path forward is to deploy smarter solutions and balance of resources both onshore and offshore, hence the term "smartshoring".
 
Top 4 Related Links

Future Outsourcing. (Youtube, March 1, 2008)
Future of Outsourcing and Offshoring. (Youtube, June 20 2007)
Business Process Management and Outsourcing. (Youtube, Nov 2, 2007)
Beyond Outsourcing to Smartsourcing. (Forbes, Aug 11, 2006)