Workleaf

With the conclusion of Gartner Inc.’s Outsourcing Summit last week at Dallas, we should be expecting to see some analysis, forecasts and general opinions on the Outsourcing industry in the media this week. Here’s one of them.

This article in Computer World highlights the issue of rising costs in Offshoring to India and the alternatives that were discussed during the summit. To quote some of the interesting snippets from the article -

“One conference attendee whose company runs its own offshore development facility in India agreed with Gartner’s assessment of the wage increases in India. “We’re finding that ourselves,” said the attendee, who requested anonymity. He added that his CIO asked him last year to investigate other countries, and his company is currently looking at China as a possible alternative for offshore IT work.“

 The primary motive behind sticking with India seems to be the location’s ability in providing the assurance of availability of a large pool of skilled workers. Although information executives are not against looking at other regions of the globe, the standard of service that has already been established by India based service providers seems to be hard to match, by providers from other locations.

But I have always found that the most interesting piece of information in such articles is always in the discussion that ensues between the proponents and opponents of outsourcing in the discussion thread. The discussion thread in this articles seems to indicate that it is going in a similar direction as well!

Stay tuned… more analysis and forecast will follow.

- Vinod.

Alright… it took me a while just to digest the fact and make sure that I was reading it right. Yes – Outsourcing does NOT necessarily mean outside the US. It can be the other way too. Apparently, according to “The China Post”, the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C., plans to outsource the processing of visas to an American company. And before you start thinking “it must have been another Indian company based in this country”, wait! It seems that they have been fairly open about the vendor selection process, by advertising in the Washington Post and soliciting proposals from any company to take on this work.

And why did I read about it in a Chinese newspaper, rather than an Indian one? I have no clue!

If “The Goal” was a novelistic story about manufacturing and its travails, “Thriving In The Flat World” is a perspective on outsourcing from the outsourced! Business expert Andy Sharma, in his book, talks about job loss, career transformation and ways to deal with a changing industry landscape that is sweeping across the IT sector today. Mr. Sharma’s take is that outsourcing is not necessarily bad, and can present new opportunities to employees and lead to new job satisfaction.The book chronicles the fall and rise of a man’s career trajectory after being affected by outsourcing.

Side Note:  Interestingly, this book, which is available for sale on Amazon.com and Borders.com is published by BookSurge – a self-publishing and print-on-demand services company. A firm that I had contemplated using a couple of years ago. And why didn’t I use them? Coz I just didn’t complete my book