12-14 years ago, they outsourced everything locally to contractors. Then, to "save money", they hired the contractors in house. (I was one of them)
7-8 years ago, they offshored and/or outsourced everything to "save money". This devastated their internal knowledge base, as 80+% of the 200 or so IT people quit. (I was ALSO one of them). The effort wound up being an unmitigated disaster, nearly all management from the CIO down was sacked.
The company learned that it took as much money and effort to have internal people micromanage the offshore workers, as it did to actually hire internal people who could do the work. They're now rebuilding, having sacked all of the contractors and/or offshore staff, and hiring people internally again. Actually bringing back a lot of those that were brought in 12-14 years ago. (I'm NOT one of them, I learned my lesson.)
My guess? In a few years, Management will have forgotten what they learned and the process will start all over again.
It's all a cyclical process of destruction and rebuilding. My cynical take on it was that if a company keeps outsourcing to "Save Money", then insourcing to "Save Money" ... then sooner or later enough dough will be saved so that IT will become a profit center. :-)
The company learned that it took as much money and effort to have internal people micromanage the offshore workers, as it did to actually hire internal people who could do the work. They're now rebuilding, having sacked all of the contractors and/or offshore staff, and hiring people internally again. Actually bringing back a lot of those that were brought in 12-14 years ago. (I'm NOT one of them, I learned my lesson.)
I've seen this personally myself as well. Hiring offshore doesn't save any money except in PHB's vacant heads. Before I left the last company I was at, they layed off their entire internal Oracle DB team. One of the guys had been with the company for over 30 years. (This is for a company btw, that is essentially an analytics company. Knowledge is their primary product, all of which is contained in --- databases) They don't realize that you can't buy that kind of institutional knowledge. Recently they've started to re-hire locally, but word is out, and they can't get quality folks.