Whereas the companies practicing outsourcing have, by and large, limited the practice to tasks outside core competencies, there’s a new fashion taking hold in IT, KPO, and it’s changing that. KPO is short for knowledge process outsourcing, which at least one report declares to be “the next generation of outsourcing.” “We’re talking about financial services companies going outside their borders for company valuations, feasibility analysis, fraud analytics; health care facilities having doctors in India read x-rays — you name it,” Ephraim Schwartz writes in Outsourcing moves to the core. “Let’s face it. Outsourcing has gained credibility among most [of] the organizations that have employed the staffing strategy for so-called commodity skills, begging the question, how much longer before outsourcing providers gain the respectability necessary to take on core business functionality?” No one is immune. Technology Industry