A situation to explore
A service is brought inside, but its model, cloud platform or data source still comes from outside. The contract map looks simpler while the underlying dependencies may remain—and can become harder to see inside a collection of small tools.
The assumption worth revisiting.
Internal delivery can improve understanding and control. It can also concentrate work on a small set of providers or a single internal expert. The sourcing decision should make those dependencies visible before the business relies on them.
Which part of this “internal” service would we be unable to provide on our own?
Give the capacity a purpose.
Put recovery, understanding and ownership into the comparison of internal, external and mixed options. Give the service owner time to explore how it would continue if a dependency changed.
How this fits the capacity allocation →
Use AI to challenge your first interpretation
Help me explore this question: Which part of this “internal” service would we be unable to provide on our own? Identify the assumptions in our current approach. Offer alternative explanations, including one that challenges our preferred answer. Separate hypotheses from evidence and suggest what we should ask the people affected.
Treat the answers as possibilities to test with people and evidence.
Go deeper into the evidence.
Bank of England and FCA · Regulator survey
Among 118 responding financial-services firms, the top three providers accounted for 73% of named cloud providers and 44% of named model providers. Forty-six per cent of respondents reported only partial understanding of the AI technologies they used.
A survey of UK-regulated financial-services firms. Provider shares refer to providers named in the survey, not global market share, spend or outage probability. Partial understanding is self-reported and does not itself demonstrate a control failure.
UK Government Commercial Agency / Government Commercial Function · Official decision framework
The framework compares internal, purchased and mixed delivery using whole-life costs, capability, risks and outcomes.
Public-sector guidance, not evidence that insourcing saves money or a general legal requirement for private companies. Applying the method here is TIP’s interpretation.
podcast
Agentic AI and the future of global business services
McKinsey · McKinsey Talks Operations
A useful prompt to reconsider the boundary of shared services: which decisions and activities could move closer to internal operating knowledge?
Listen or watch for: Would moving more work inside improve the complete process, or simply move a bottleneck?
About this resource
Consultancy examples and forecasts. The episode does not establish that insourcing is always cheaper or that predicted headcount reductions will occur.
Turn the question around.
Your customer’s insourcing opportunity could change your own business model. Explore which part of your offer they could own, and the value they would still want from you.
Explore the commercial risk →How TIP applies this to itself →