Freelancing and Outsourcing .

 What Is Freelancing?

Freelancing is a contract-based profession where instead of being recruited in an organization, the person uses his skills and experience to provide services to a number of clients.

In simple terms, freelancing is when you use your skills, education, and experience to work with multiple clients and take on various assignments without committing to a single employer. The number of assignments or tasks that you can take just boils down to your ability to deliver on them as asked from them.

Freelancing usually involves jobs (called gigs) that allow you to work-from-home situations. But don’t associate freelancing as the same as having a work-from-home job.

1. Freelancing doesn’t always mean that you’ll work from home. You might have to work at your client’s office too depending upon the type of work and the client’s requirements.
2. A work-from-home job involves a contract between you and a single employer who gives you a salary while freelancing doesn’t.

It is just that many of the jobs that freelancers perform can be delivered over the Internet without their presence at the company or clients' place.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a business practice in which services or job functions are farmed out to a third party. In information technology, an outsourcing initiative with a technology provider can involve a range of operations, from the entirety of the IT function to discrete, easily defined components, such as disaster recovery, network services, software development, or QA testing.

Companies may choose to outsource IT services onshore (within their own country), nearshore (to a neighboring country or one in the same time zone), or offshore (to a more distant country). Nearshore and offshore outsourcing have traditionally been pursued to save costs.

The business case for outsourcing varies by situation, but the benefits of outsourcing often include one or more of the following:

• lower costs (due to economies of scale or lower labor rates)
• increased efficiency
• variable capacity
• increased focus on strategy/core competencies
• access to skills or resources
• increased flexibility to meet changing business and commercial conditions
• accelerated time to market
• lower ongoing investment in internal infrastructure
• access to innovation, intellectual property, and thought leadership
• possible cash influx resulting from transfer of assets to the new provider

Some of the risks of outsourcing include:

• slower turnaround time
• lack of business or domain knowledge
• language and cultural barriers
• time zone differences
• lack of control 

• Outsourcing services

  Business process outsourcing (BPO) is an overarching term for the outsourcing of a specific business process task, such as payroll. BPO is often divided into two categories: back-office BPO, which includes internal business functions such as billing or purchasing, and front-office BPO, which includes customer-related services such as marketing or tech support. Information technology outsourcing (ITO), therefore, is a subset of business process outsourcing.

  While most business process outsourcing involves executing standardized processes for a company, knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) involves processes that demand advanced research and analytical, technical, and decision-making skills such as pharmaceutical R&D or patent research.

  IT outsourcing clearly falls under the domain of the CIO. However, CIOs often will be asked to be involved in — or even oversee — non-ITO business process and knowledge process outsourcing efforts as well. CIOs are tapped not only because they often have developed skills in outsourcing, but also because business and knowledge process work being outsourced often goes hand in hand with IT systems and support.