Some outsourcing is inevitable. But as the former deputy CIO of Procter & Gamble learned, it’s crucial to retain enough work in-house to train the next generation of IT leaders.

These days, there is certainly no shortage of debate on the relative merits or evils of outsourcing. One thing’s for sure: Outsourcing will continue to increase over the next several years. Close to 500,000 American IT jobs have already been lost since 2001, many of them to offshore outsourcing. An unspoken corporate lemming behavior will continue to fuel this growth for years to come. When industry leaders such as GE, DuPont, Citibank, GM or Procter & Gamble do something, others take notice and many will follow.

CIOs cannot single-handedly reverse the forces moving U.S. jobs overseas. While I’d love to see thousands of CIOs come together as a united bloc to influence IT-related policy matters, the sad reality is we don’t have a clear, unified voice right now. Therefore, I strongly encourage CIOs to rise above the “religious fervor” and focus on the things they can control in order to ensure the best possible outcomes for their companies, their IT organizations and the U.S. IT industry.

First and foremost, CIOs need to be proactive. Don’t wait until your CEO or CFO walks into your office asking you about the merits of offshoring or “Why is Company X outsourcing its IT work?” At this point, you’re now playing defense, my friend.

CIOs should proactively look at their own IT operations and determine which portions are strategic, and which are basically nondifferentiated services. The latter may be candidates for outsourcing. For example, CIOs in retailing appropriately view their customer-facing systems as very strategic and usually do their development in-house. But what about application maintenance or help desks? Do those IT services differentiate your company from the competition? I doubt it.

Ideally, the CIO’s offensive game plan should evolve from the company’s overarching business philosophy to focus on its true core competencies. This requires redirecting employees’ energy from internal machinations to focusing only on initiatives that differentiate your business in the marketplace.

At P&G, this strategic philosophy was at the heart of the decision to outsource some of IT as well as other non-IT, back-office operations. About 25 years ago, P&G developed an internal e-mail system, which R&D used extensively to proliferate the best ideas for product development and manufacturing. In 1980, this was a strategic application. Recently, P&G concluded that internally running a world-class e-mail operation no longer creates a sustainable competitive advantage. Now the company gets that service from Hewlett-Packard as part of a large, multiyear outsourcing agreement signed in 2003.

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