Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility.

Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility. By Linda Cohen and Allie Young. Harvard Business School Press, 243 pages. $35.

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As Linda Cohen and Allie Young see it, too many companies have an ad hoc, "where can I save?" approach to sourcing that isn't woven into their strategic planning and may even appear--in their words--chaotic and compulsive.

"Companies enter contracts without integrated planning, strategy and management--leading to wasted efforts and misplaced dollars due to miscommunication, misalignment and poor governance," they write. Instead, they propose a more holistic framework they call "multisourcing," which includes outsourcing as well as internal resources, in which services "are blended seamlessly, governed closely and evaluated continuously for effectiveness and efficiency."

That's probably a paradigm few companies could ever reach, though it certainly seems worth aspiring to. But Cohen and Young, executives at Gartner Research who have consulted extensively with companies in various industries, stress that results stem from discipline. Ideally, that creates a platform that allows organizations to build capability, expand globally, become more agile and profitable and find competitive advantage.

A key principle is that multisourcing is about relationships, not transactions; it's about creating partners. Governance of the process, they write, is the most important factor in determining success--even more critical than strategy.

Graced by good tables and charts, Multisourcing is written in a conversational way, almost as if the authors were talking to a roomful of clients. It's logical, nicely synthesized and well-constructed, and should be on the reading list of executives charged with managing or expanding a sourcing practice.