Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Openness or secrecy?

The competing claims of secrecy and openness result in outsourcing clients becoming polarized between two distinct and fundamentally divergent approaches to the transition phase. At one extreme there is the board that creates a specialist team in complete secrecy to manage the change, pursues the project as a covert operation, and tries to prevent information leaking out both internally and externally. At the other extreme, some boards look to proceed with a high degree of openness via an approach based on early and coordinated communication throughout the process.

CEOs and boards may find the first of these approaches superficially attractive for a number of reasons. Opting for secrecy means that the senior management, when ...