Offshore Outsourcing is Exporting IT Jobs
The landscape of the IT world is changing very quickly in North America. Technology is advancing quickly. But so are new business processes. Two of these business processes are outsourcing and offshore outsourcing.
Outsourcing, generally speaking makes a great deal of sense for information technology. Projects move in phases. In each of these phases of a project, the skills and talents that are required can vary greatly. It is uncommon for one person to be an expert at planning, developing, and testing.
Rather than hire every resource that the company could possibly require, smart companies in the past few years would hire consultants. These consultants, while highly paid, would solve their jobs quickly and skillfully, with the precision of a surgeon.
More and more, current companies are turning to offshore outsourcing. In principal, offshore outsourcing works very similarly to simple outsourcing. However, in this case, the smart company looks globally to find where it can find high quality consulting at the most cost effective price.
A recent
Computerworld article compares this offshore outsourcing to what happened to US manufacturing jobs that were sent overseas 20-30 years ago. The result here, is that what defines a technology worker will quickly be redefined.
A very prophetic comment is made by Steve Andriole, a senior consultant at Arlington, Mass.-based Cutter Consortium.
If you buy the argument that a lot of IT has become commoditized, [then] we are becoming inventors, creators, integrators and architects, and we are going to send the production offshore...
In the short term, this is one step higher up the food chain. In the long term, it will be very interesting to see what the effects of outsourcing and offshore outsourcing will be in the United States.
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