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Insourcing is a business practice in which work that would otherwise have been contracted out is performed in house.

Insourcing often involves bringing in specialists to fill temporary needs or training existing personnel to perform tasks that would otherwise have been outsourced. An example is the use of in-house engineers to write technical manuals for equipment they have designed, rather than sending the work to an outside technical writing firm. In this example, the engineers might have to take technical writing courses at a local college, university, or trade school before being able to complete the task successfully. Other challenges of insourcing include the possible purchase of additional hardware and/or software that is scalable and energy-efficient enough to deliver an adequate return on investment (ROI).

Insourcing can be viewed as outsourcing as seen from the opposite side. For example, a company based in Japan might open a plant in the United States for the purpose of employing American workers to manufacture Japanese products. From the Japanese perspective this is outsourcing, but from the American perspective it is insourcing. Nissan, a Japanese automobile manufacturer, has in fact done this.

"Solution Architecture is the essential, unifying concept of an information system and its effective deployment into an operational environment to solve a key business problem." HP

Ten Rules for the Solution Architect

1. Listen and learn: Customers will appreciate it if you understanding their environment and business needs fully before you try to sell them your solution. This builds the customer's trust.
2. Lead diplomatically: In most cases, the customer is not only paying for a service, but also a motivated person to take charge of the situation and provide a clear direction. However, always be prepared to give other people time and space to express themselves.
3. Develop an area of expertise: Understand in depth a specific area of technology, and take leadership in it. Collaborate with other leaders who can supplement your knowledge in other areas.
4. Capitalize on repeatability: Capitalize on work already done for other customers. By using experiences from similar customer situations and adapting them to your customer's situation, you can deliver a solution faster with a higher success rate. Use SDKs to guide you and provide a consistent service approach, but rely on proven implementations.
5. Be aware of the market: Have a global view of alternative solutions available on the market and be able to discuss and compare them with your solution.
6. Keep business needs in mind: Understand the costs and business impacts of the technology and the solutions you are proposing. Keep business benefits and the customer's priorities paramount.
7. Look for design acceptance: During the initial part of the design phase, be open and frank with the customer and look for acceptance of a solution. This is far better than spending weeks developing something in isolation, then fighting for acceptance later. Discuss design principles and constraining factors and be prepared to defend the design rationale behind your solution.
8. Don't go to extremes: Adopt a common-sense approach to planning and design of a solution and match it to the customer situation. What the marketing hype promotes, or what you think might be interesting to experiment with, may not always be suitable. What is good for one customer may not be suitable for others. Keep an open mind.
9. Look for a best fit: If a solution is too complex or costly for a customer to implement, look at the part that could solve a majority of problems. Suggest an optimal solution that stays within the customer's budget and yet brings a maximum of benefits.
10. Leverage the client's investment: Wherever possible, use the infrastructure already in place to effect transitions. Question the sense of putting in technology for short-term use with doubtful benefits. An example of this is a transitional infrastructure put in place at heavy cost that becomes obsolete when the project is finished.

A trend where the organisations who normally outsource their business processes based on decisions marked by the economics of low costs, seek to retain the internal functions that can be better handled in house. Backsourcing trend is often related to the multi-sourcing trend,where if the outsourcing is more distributed across the various vendors in various geographic locations, it makes sense to have the relationship with the vendors better coordinated, maintained and managed using in house VRM (Vendor relationship management) expertise.

Backsourcing refers to the return to the in house or native structure of processes that were formerly outsourced to another entity. This can be due to many reason, most often to an expiration or termination of an outsourcing agreement.