A Question of Style: Taking Outsourced Page Composition to a Higher Level

Executive Summary

The concept of outsourcing has grown quite familiar to business professionals over the past five years. More and more, company executives in virtually every industry are outsourcing components of their operations. In fact, the Associated Press reported in July that the outsourcing market for software and back office services in India alone reached $17.2 billion for the year ending in March 2005.

Before embarking on an outsourcing strategy, companies need to carefully evaluate which activities create true value for their customers and are sustainable in a competitive environment. Only then can they make an intelligent decision on which processes should be outsourced and which ones should remain in-house.

Depending on a company’s strategy or competitive positioning, a wealth of processes are ripe for outsourcing. This report will focus on one area that is seeing great success: the composition of rigidly stylized documents that, once established, can support automated publishing with little or no manual intervention...