Australia to benefit from Indian outsourcing
Australia has joined the outsourcing world by shipping more programming projects to developing countries like India. Contrary to abounding fears though, this does not drain Australians of jobs, but instead, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA), actually spells better jobs for Australian coders.
The AIIA has released a study detailing the effect of offshoring legacy projects on Australian businesses. In a positive turn of events, it shows that Australian businesses are actually improving their high-end skills that way.
Independent researcher Mark Hollands found out that graduates are now turning up their noses at traditional programming skills and opting instead to move to higher and more prestigious challenges. Implications of this are companies farming out legacy projects offshore and increasing the high-level skills of employees.
Hollands posits,
"CIOs are noticing a different attitude amongst young people. They used to be happy to hack away at low level code but are not interested in that anymore. They are not playing around with the old code – like COBOL -- which we have to have because they are on our legacy systems. If the graduates today are not going to work on it, who is?"
A survey of CIOs comes up with a unanimous answer: offshore outsourcing.
The study is optimistic about Australia being able to challenge India and the other developing countries for control and processing of high-end outsourcing projects from US and Europe-based companies – as long as Australia keeps up development of its programming skills. The study, The Status of Offshore Outsourcing in Australia covered the May – August 2004 period, involving 32 CIOs from a different industry sectors all over Australia.
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