`Charbonneau Loops' and government IT contracting

A quick post to share a link to this interesting read about outsourcing and in-house capacity, which I can relate to working in public sector IT: ‘Charbonneau Loops’ and government IT contracting.

We’re working hard in our little software engineering corner at Homes England to build a strong, permanent development capability, and to establish Digital as a directorate that can deliver larger products. We’re not doing this so that we can build everything. But rather, to avoid passing a tipping point, outsourcing more, where developers and testers either leave, or their skillsets become obsolete. Then not only do we lose the knowledge to oversee outsourced work, but we are also not able to support it.

Xiaopu Fung, who works in the Canadian public sector, captured it well:

We need to build and ship in order to keep flexing our in-house capacity muscles, otherwise we atrophy.