Apple, during the holiday season, ran a heartwarming ad about a hard-of-hearing father who had given his daughter a guitar. The daughter played and sang a pretty tune. Her mother signaled her father to turn up the volume on his Airpods so he could enjoy his daughter’s song.

His Airpods performed even better than he might have imagined, because if you listened to the ad closely you noticed that his daughter was harmonizing with herself.

No, this has little or nothing to do with this week’s essay, which is about your sourcing strategy and how to organize it. I just figured AI’s new Apple-driven ability for singers to harmonize with themselves in real time was worthy of note.

On to more consequential subjects.

We’ve been talking about H-1B visas and related matters, and it occurred to me that so often, CIOs are advised to create strategies about subsets rather than whole sets. The advice to craft an H-1B strategy is just the latest example. It’s bad advice because any decision to engage H-1B workers is also a decision to not use: internal staff; consultants; contractors engaged either singly or through a staff-augmentation provider; on-shore integrators; or multi-shore integrators.

And, for each of these categories you as CIO get to choose from among in-person, hybrid, or fully virtual staff.

Which is to say you need, not an H-1B strategy, but a Sourcing Strategy.

To make this decision, you should first decide which characteristics are most important for the workforce roles you have to populate – characteristics such as compatibility with your business culture; familiarity with your organization’s methodologies; loyalty; ability to provide leadership; and anticipated time-zone-driven frictions in team functioning.

And not, by the way, how many labor dollars per hour you can save. As Fred Brooks documented in his classic The Mythical Man Month, the best employees are easily 10 times more effective than average ones. Do the math – it isn’t hard to compute the benefit of paying even double for the best.

Then there’s your ability to locate, recruit, orient, hire, and on-board staff with the scale and time-frames you need.

Next: you’re going to be engaging a different sort of staff, and in significant quantities, which means you should think through how management practices will need to change as well; not to mention how IT is organized.

Think you’re done thinking? Think again. If your sourcing depends on staff relationships other than employees … especially if you’re planning to outsource to teams that will be responsible for broad swaths of IT functions … you need to organize responsibilities so the companies involved don’t have perverse incentives that lead them to act in ways that benefit them at your expense.

This entails more than just structuring the flow of work and well-defined governance processes. It also includes making sure your outsourcers cooperate with your internal teams (the easy part) and making sure your multiple sources cooperate with each other.

Then there’s the little matter of threading the needle between taking maximum advantage of your newfound labor sources’ expertise and making sure they conform to your IT standards and practices.

Want more? Here’s more: head down the path of relying on external sources – any sources other than hiring employees – and you’ll find it won’t be a popular decision. Plan your communication to your IT staff accordingly.

Then, if your sourcing will rely on non-vernacular US English, plan some more, because you’ll find you’re vulnerable to what I have in the past called the “soft bigotry of accents.” Whether your future workforce will include workers with H-1B visas or “Zoom visas,” your own workforce will instinctively gravitate to working with native English speakers, simply because conversations are harder in direct proportion to accents being thicker.

Oh, one last thing: As you plan, make sure to make and reinforce a message to your company’s executive leadership team: None of the goals of your shiny new sourcing strategy will be to save money.

The barriers to effective functioning are high enough without sacrificing the excellence of the IT workforce on the altar of cheaping out.