Further, talent now has the upper hand, synergy does not always happen and the industry is almost insanely competitive.

"If you've pushed all your employees out the door and they are all freelancers, then the best are going to get a lot of work, and the not-so-good are going to get some work, and the not-very-good are going to get not much work. So the best are going to be in great demand and the cost to acquire their services is going to rise, because they now have a very clear sense of their own value and they want to maximize their reward while they are valuable," McElroy says.

"You have a situation where there is a diminishing talent pool or a limited talent pool, as there always is in every business, in every industry. You've forced them out into the marketplace so they are going to make marketplace evaluations about their value to future employers. They are going to be ruthless about that, and the question of loyalty or obligation has disappeared."

Nor can you guarantee that assembled members of an ad hoc team will not descend into infighting and wrangling, driven by personality incompatibilities or jealousies.

Then there is the ugly.

On this rather longer list, McElroy slots: a total lack of corporate memory; a plethora of out of control movies - either delayed, over budget or just plain bad; and the fact that producers no longer have the luxury of reshooting movies if the first attempt does not work. Limited talent availability can lead to feeding frenzies, and "talent" displays no loyalty, just greed. Project team members feel no sense of care or responsibility, and cannot be relied on to keep confidential information to their chests.

At the same time, marketing costs have soared while publicity is now a cost not a service. And the old management levers no longer work: You cannot offer freelancers standard carrots such as promotion, salary increase or job title and you cannot threaten them with loss of job security or superannuation.

"Persuading a disparate bunch of talented, independent strong-willed consultants to do a specific task in a specific time frame and budget is very different from ordering a bunch of loyal employees to do what they're told! So the old rules don't apply," McElroy says.

The Price to Be Paid

Another issue, which most IT managers thinking of outsourcing can identify with, is that of after-sales service.

"If you've dispersed with your corporate knowledge, and if you've outsourced all of your production or manufacturing capacity, and those people who are doing it for you leave at the end of a job, then when the job goes to market there may be problems but you don't now have the easy capacity to fix the problems or identify them in some fashion," McElroy says. "This is particularly true in IT because the people who built it, made it, created it, are gone.

"So there is a price to be paid. I've lived with this sort of system all my life. I accept it's a reality. It was only when someone started talking to me about the Hollywood Model and its advantages that I realized there were problems and they had become part of the unfortunate routine of my life. When a production finishes and the crew's gone home, there's a pile of problems in my in-tray that the freelancers have just walked out and washed their hands of.

"That's when you're at the ugly end of it, because you have got a steaming pile of problems with no one there to deal with them. And because no one's even hinted that there might be a problem, although they may have been aware of it, it could end up being your client or the purchaser of your product that first brings it to your attention.

"In IT there's another problem, which is that if the worker perceives that the company employing them has no loyalty to them, then it's no surprise that they have no loyalty to the company. So the question of confidentiality and ownership of the intellectual property created becomes a real challenge. You may find that you employ a programmer to work on a particular project, they finish, and then go and work for the opposition using your knowledge that they acquired."