Article
Category: Expertise strategy
The IT landscape is shifting fast. As old outsourcing models show their cracks, forward-thinking leaders are rebuilding internal strength and redefining what smart partnerships look like. A trend is emerging where decoupling and taking back ownership takes the stage.
Beneath the surface of boardroom conversations, a quiet but important shift is taking place.
Like a slow leak under the floorboards, barely noticed until the damage becomes clear, the risks within complex supplier relationships and outsourced functions are emerging as major business challenges.
And now, amid global instability, CIOs are forced to wonder: If our external partners falter, can we keep the lights on?
Jan Winther, Executive Advisor at emagine
For decades, outsourcing IT was seen as the clever play: move faster, spend less, and lean on external expertise. And it worked - until the world became less predictable.
In 2025, that once-trusted model is under pressure. Global instability, rigid contracts and gatekept knowledge makes it hard to get out of dysfunctional outsourcing setups. CIOs are now facing a hard truth: What once gave us a competitive edge is now our greatest vulnerability.
“By fully outsourcing, many have found out that they are not in control of the digital foundation of their business and have ended up with legacy software or platforms which are very expensive or impossible to adjust” explains Jan Winther, executive advisor in emagine.
The tendency is clear: True resilience comes from directly owning and controlling critical elements of your supply chain, reducing dependency, and fostering strategic autonomy.
At its core, taking back ownership means making sure you can stand on your own if you must. It doesn’t mean abandoning external partnerships altogether.
Rather, it’s about creating a foundation where they are valuable, but never critical for survival.
For decades, outsourcing IT was seen as the clever play: move faster, spend less, and lean on external expertise. And it worked - until the world became less predictable.
Think of it like owning a house: You might hire experts to renovate your kitchen or fix your roof, but you must hold the deed. You make the decisions. And if needed, you can take matters into your own hands.
In IT, that means investing in internal expertise, controlling key business assets and processes and ensuring knowledge and competencies remain in your organization. It means choosing partners who empower your teams, transfer knowledge, and build digital capabilities inside your organisation. Not gatekeepers who lock you in.
Rather, you need to foster smarter, more transparent IT partnerships that will build you up and leave you with the full operational ownership.
“In the new thinking organisations, you are now relying on building up internal agile development organisations,” Winther says, adding “And building platforms based on reusable open source software, often supported by new AI-supported development tools.”
But why this shift now?
In the early days of organisational IT, companies built and ran their own systems, housed their own servers and wrote their own software. This inevitably made them in charge of not just the technology, but the skills and know-how of the business as well.
Then came the new millennium, and with it a need for cost savings, flexibility and a “focus on the core business” (Deloitte 2016). This shift triggered a widespread outsourcing boom, driven by the promise of significant cost reductions, faster innovation cycles, and reduced management overhead.
Companies rapidly transitioned critical operational functions to external partners, which initially seemed to offer considerable advantages.
Risks, however, were often brushed aside in favour of speed and growth. Organisations would proceed without thorough contingency plans, assuming stable conditions would remain indefinitely.
Over time, many organisations found themselves more and more detached from essential skills and knowledge, losing the capability to manage and adapt their own systems effectively. Eventually, internal ownership and direct control over business-critical IT assets were neglected.
Fast forward 25 years. Like the slow leak, the cracks in IT setups are now too big to ignore. External disruptions, market unpredictability, and the complexities of global supply chains have exposed the risks of relying too much on external suppliers.
And business leaders are taking notice. According to Cleo 83% of business leaders state that supply chain resilience is now equally as important as cybersecurity. Similarly, a Gartner survey from 2024 shows that 73% of companies have made supply chain network changes in the past two years in response to these growing vulnerabilities.
On top of that, complex supplier set-ups and opaque costs leave many organisations with a feeling of being conned into overdependency on their IT suppliers.
You need to foster smarter, more transparent IT partnerships that will build you up and leave you with the full operational ownership.
“In many sectors we have seen that by outsourcing IT platforms for specific areas of the business domain, the dominant IT vendors have created monopoly or duopoly situations in the market,” Winther says “Many organisations now are stuck in some kind of vendor lock-in, with rising cost and less control in innovation and development of their own key business processes.”
Leaders now see clearly that resilience demands more than well-structured contracts. It involves actively rebuilding internal capabilities, reclaiming ownership of essential business functions, and establishing transparent, flexible partnerships.
At emagine, we see this shift not as an end to consultancy, but a call for the right kind of consultancy. One that helps regain clarity, strategic independence and competence to build up the organization, not trap it in rigid supplier set-ups. Those who invest now in owning their business foundations and cultivating resilient, capable internal teams will undoubtedly be best positioned for future challenges.
“Without doubt there is a steep learning curve in doing this journey. But we have seen that if supported by strong expertise partners, you can actually do this transition quite fast.” Winther concludes.
Ready to find out more?Ask us how we can help you succeed.
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