IT outsourcing horror stories

Outsourcing is not for the faint of heart or the ill-prepared because when things go wrong, they tend to do so rather dramatically.

"The companies who've lived through outsourcing horrors have two things in common: lack of preparedness going into a new relationship and lack of communication once the projects gets under way," Ephraim Schwartz writes. "Other factors can make these worse, of course."

And its promise of large-scale cost-savings or improved efficiencies can only become reality when outsourcing is managed well.

Read Painful lessons from IT outsourcing gone bad.