The Hunting Ground
Your outsourcing history may contain your next AI and capability opportunity.
Over the last fifteen years, many organisations outsourced functions that were expensive, repetitive, specialist, or difficult to build internally. The decision often made sense at the time. The economics have changed. AI, automation, better data, and faster development tools mean that some capabilities now deserve to be reconsidered.
Discuss a Hunting Ground diagnosticWhere did the capability go?
The Hunting Ground starts with a question that is more useful than asking which AI tool to buy: where did our capability go, what does it cost us today, and can we now build or reclaim a better version of it?
Four discovery categories
Volume work
Rules-based, repetitive, high-frequency work that often moved to BPO providers or offshore centres.
Specialist knowledge work
Research, analysis, review, and advisory work that was cheaper to buy than build.
Systems-dependent work
Processes embedded in SaaS products or vendor-operated platforms.
Niche applications and thin services
Small tools for booking, approvals, forms, scheduling, registration, reporting, and narrow workflows. Some of these services are useful. Others are expensive wrappers around a small amount of business logic. They may be candidates for retention, consolidation, replacement, or a carefully governed internal application.
The long tail of small applications
Post-COVID, many organisations accumulated tools for desk and room booking, visitor management, simple approvals, internal forms, event registration, lightweight workflow, and local reporting. A modern development approach can make it cheaper to test whether a small internal application would be viable.
Important consideration
Fast development is not the same as production readiness. A prototype still needs authentication, security, privacy, accessibility, resilience, monitoring, support ownership, documentation, and a retirement plan for the existing service.
The five stages
Audit
Build an inventory of outsourced functions and thin services.
Test
Assess whether the process is simple, valuable, data-owned, and responsibly addressable.
Play
Compare retain, consolidate, replace, or build options.
Route
Sequence the best opportunities through OCTA and the appropriate governance pathway.
Measure
Track cost, capability, operating performance, risk, adoption, and benefit.
The decision test
"Is this a capability we should own, and can we own it responsibly at a lower total cost and better strategic fit?"
Relationship to OCTA and AI Governance
The Hunting Ground identifies the opportunity. OCTA structures the decision and execution. AI Governance provides the oversight and assurance.