Outsourcing is no longer the permanent cure for an expensive IT or business process ailment.

Having spent the past few years handing over control of troublesome processes to service providers, increasing number of technology leaders are choosing to bring control of problematic systems back in-house.

Analyst Gartner predicts the outsourcing market will grow by just five per cent per annum over the next few years, a figure far lower than the double-digit highs of a few years ago.

What's more, the analyst says four in every five outsourcing relationships will be renegotiated over the duration of a contract.

And some 64 per cent of firms have already brought an outsourced service back in-house, according to consultant Deloitte.

So what's gone wrong? Why are companies reconsidering big external service contracts for in-house provision?

Over a sustained period of time, Computing has investigated the issues and spoken to the companies involved in an attempt to understand whether UK plc is swinging towards outsourcing or insourcing.