Co-located co-working

As a procurer of services have you ever retained the services of a mid-sized or larger company to work on an aspect of a project?

I am very specifically talking about a project that doesn’t require the vendor to be co-located with you, e.g. they aren’t painting your office or laying new carpet or assembling new desks.

Can you imagine what the CEO of the company would say if you demanded that his entire staff show up at your office each day and work 9-to-5 at your premises?

Let’s take your 120 person company and integrate them with our 2,000 person company, for six months, and have them work at our office Monday through Friday.

Sounds ridiculous?

Why then do we adhere so vociferously to the notion that other individual contributors must be co-located to perform tasks that have no requirement to be in the same location as everyone else?