IT Outsourcing

I attended Manda J.’s Girl Geek Dinner last night, and encountered some interesting points regarding outsourcing issues in the industry today. As computer science graduates diminish, partly due to fear of declining demand at home, those in the industry must create and embrace some added value to make outsourcing undesirable.

Efficiency

A distance in communication naturally results in efficiency sacrifices. E.g. issues requiring a day to resolve locally may linger unaccounted for, unclearly defined, or incorrectly relayed by an outsourced party for weeks or months.

Aligned perspectives

This presents a big issue dealing with 3^rd world manufacturing facilities. With large cultural, language discrepancies, misinterpretations on product/service looks, functions, core values occur, sometimes at relatively high cost.

Corruption

Under the table transactions occur at all times. Having conducted business in China, everyone is hungry to make a buck, and everybody speaks in cryptic tongue with lots of implications. Needless to say, conflicts of interest surface and expand inevitably over time.

Making outsourcing undesirable

Notwithstanding the foregoing, many firms remain willing to make the said sacrifices in pursuit of greater profit margin. The job then comes to the next generation of IT people to convince industry leaders that the risks, the necessary sacrifices, outweigh gains off higher paid local minds. With accurate incentives, anyone can be influenced.