Outsourcing Bogeyman. CIO Today - Customer Relations - The Customer-Service Outsourcin. CyberAgent CSR™ CIBER | Welcome. U.S. firm sweet on offshoring deals gone sour | CNET News.com. Rural sourcing. U.S. firm sweet on offshoring deals gone sour. Joanne Pratt: Implements Telework. Gil Gordon Associates: Telecommuting. Off Site Works. ACM Queue - Outsourcing: Devising a Game Plan. Stay-at-home Reps Stem Offshore Outsourcing (IW, 2004-12-22) Some companies are moving call centers into home, turning to what a research firm dubs "home-shoring" as a way to keep productive employees and trim costs.
"The home-shoring phenomenon comes in part as a result of the significant challenges faced in the customer relationship management (CRM) and customer care space over the last four years," said IDC analyst Stephen Loynd in a statement. Rather than outsource customer service to foreign firms in places like India, said Loynd, some U.S. corporations are letting call reps work from home. "Compared with traditional outsourcing and offshore, companies utilizing home-based agents can access highly skilled representatives that are closely attuned to the U.S. market at very reasonable cost," said Loynd. IDC estimated that there are currently about 100,000 home-based phone representatives in the United States.
A U.S. IDC's Loynd sees home-shoring, also called "home-sourcing," as a way to keep the jobs inside U.S. borders. More Insights. Epson Portland brings jobs back home. The Rediff Interview | Thomas Friedman. Home > Business > Interviews The Rediff Interview/Thomas L Friedman September 13, 2004 In the controversy over outsourcing, the movement of jobs to India found an unlikely ally -- Thomas L Friedman, the legendary foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner for reporting from and commentary on the Middle East, Friedman visited India some months ago to see for himself what the fuss was about, and came back convinced that outsourcing wasn't as bad as it was being made out to be. As he later told his audience at Pace University's Michael Schimmel Centre for the Arts in downtown Manhattan, "Outsourcing is the canary in the coal mine.
" Meaning: it is not the issue in itself, but just the first warning of a larger issue. Of course, during his visit to India, he wrote a series about the emerging BPO industry, and made a documentary about it, The World Ate My Job. Part I: 'India has the innate ability to glocalize' And the government reflected that. JP Morgan eats IBM outsourcing contract | The Register.
High performance access to file storage JP Morgan is canning a $5bn, seven-year outsourcing agreement with IBM. IBM won the contract ahead of EDS and CSC, taking responsibility for the investment bank's data centres, desktop support and network services. The deal was signed 30 December 2002 and was hailed by Eric Ray, vice president for financial services at IBM, as "the largest computer services deal in the financial services sector".
Four thousand JP Morgan staff moved to IBM: they are all returning to the bank, beginning January 2005. JP Morgan recently merged with Bank One and, following a review, decided it now has enough capacity in-house to manage its own technology. Austin Adams, CIO at JP Morgan Chase, said: "We believe managing our own technology infrastructure is best for the long-term growth and success of our company as well as our shareholders. Related stories IBM Global Services: billion dollar dealsIBM Q4 sales stable, profits hurtingIBM wins $5bn JP Morgan outsourcing deal. Outsourcing creates American jobs (3/30/2004) NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The outsourcing of prized information technology jobs overseas has created tens of thousands of new jobs in the United States, according to a recent study commissioned by the information technology industry.
Global Insight, a private consulting firm hired by the Information Technology Association of America, an industry lobbying firm, said that, while outsourcing does result in some short-term U.S. unemployment, its long-term benefits outweigh its costs. "The cost savings and use of offshore resources lower inflation, increase productivity and lower interest rates," Global Insight said in a statement. "This boosts business and consumer spending and increases economic activity. " According to this study, these benefits "ripple" through the economy, leading to about 90,000 net new jobs through the end of 2003.
The study also said outsourcing added some $33.6 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003 and could add a total of $124.2 billion through 2008. Daniel W. Drezner: Public opinion about offshore outsourcing (6/ Public opinion about offshore outsourcing A while back, I blogged here and here about how American consumer behavior seems generally unaffected by the spectre of outsourcing -- i.e., Americans make choices based more on price than origin of production. To be fair, some people do not think this way -- click here for a few examples courtesy of Newsweek. Beyond anecdotal evidence, however, what do Americans now think about outsourcing? And do these feelings affect their behavior? Two recent polls -- one by the Employment Law Alliance ("the world’s largest independent network of labor and employment attorneys") and one by Ipsos (for the Associated Press) suggest some commonalities and cleavages on the issue.
On the one hand, the polls largely confirm that most Americans are mercantilists at heart. At the same time, the ELA poll shows that 46% of Americans believe that offshoring has been exaggerated by the media. So how does this affect actual consumer behavior? Comments: And so on. Inmates vs. Outsourcing. Inmates vs. outsourcing By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY ONTARIO, Ore. — David Day has a bounce in his step and a glint in his eye unexpected in someone who makes nearly 400 telemarketing calls a day for less than $200 a month. That's because he has a coveted job where few exist: behind bars.
Day, 43, is one of 85 inmates who arrange business meetings from a call center at the Snake River Correctional Institution, a state penitentiary in this onion- and potato-producing town not far from the Idaho line. "I'm grateful for the opportunity. Many of us end up here because we didn't have jobs and lacked communications skills," he says on a recent morning, ponytail cascading down his state-issued denims. (Photo gallery: Prison call centers) If not for consulting firm Perry Johnson's aversion to moving jobs offshore, Day, who was convicted of assault, and his cellmates wouldn't be working.
Market conditions seem to favor prisons. But the convicted workforce elicits as much dread as interest. Grunt work. Phil Windley: Big Outsourcing Deals. JP Morgan Chase recently dropped a big, multi-year IT outsourcing deal they had with IBM. IBM's performance wasn't the issue, but financially it had stopped making sense. Baseline Magazine has a detailed story about the development. The company's CIO, Austin Adams, said at the time: "We believe managing our own technology infrastructure is best for the long-term growth and success of our company ... to become more efficient. " What really changed things was the July 2004 merger of JP Morgan Chase with Bank One, which had gained a reputation for consolidating data centers and eliminating thousands of computer applications. So, after the merger, Bank One showed JP Morgan Chase how to do it themselves better and cheaper.
I spoke to one CIO recently who's company had a five-year deal with EDS. The one area that you can outsource without much impact on your business is service delivery functions like networks and desktops. A good compromise is in-sourcing. Outsourcing scholarly articles. Outsourcing security. Good outsourcing links. Offshore security: Considering the risks. Computerworld - The economics driving the globalization of IT infrastructure is putting the spotlight on the security of offshore IT operations, primarily in India. Huge investments are being made that assume that the risk of offshore security can be managed, as long as the necessary homework is done. Certainly offshore service providers have the financial muscle to provide secure offshore IT infrastructure. One of the most popular nations for outsourcing is India, which is recording double-digit growth in revenues from IT services, which are expected to reach $57 billion in 2008, according to a joint study by McKinsey & Co. and Nasscom, an Indian software association.
Based on a U.S. model of spending 5% to 7% of the IT budget on security, and with the IT budget consuming 15% of a service company's revenue, India should be ramping up to spend $450 to $600 million on information security and assurance by 2008. Let the buyer beware The steps involved Some offshore concerns. Guest worker visas. Outsourcing debate, pros and cons. But is it bad for the U.S. economy? Two economists debate the issue By Timothy Aeppel Wall Street Journal May 10, 2004. DOES OFFSHORE outsourcing hurt the U.S. economy by draining away jobs and investment, or does it ultimately make the U.S. stronger?
Is it a cost-cutting tactic that should be encouraged, or should it be punished in some way? The issue has become a hot button this election year. Framing the debate in economic terms can be tricky, because while economic theory offers tidy equations that lead to win-win situations, there are losers in the real world. It's also problematic that the pain is felt quickly and prominently, while benefits are spread out over time and hard to quantify, says Haseeb Ahmed, an economist at Economy.com, an economic-research company in West Chester, Pa. Jagdish N. Prof. Paul Craig Roberts is a former assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy in the Reagan administration and was once an avid free-trader. Mr. Mr. MR. MR. MR. MR. MR. MR. MR. USA Today: Outsourcing. To start up here, companies hire over there By Jim Hopkins, USA TODAY SAN FRANCISCO — OfficeTiger is the sort of young technology company that once created thousands of high-paying jobs in the USA, fueling sizzling economic growth.
The 5-year-old business employs 200 in the USA. Yet it employs 2,000 more in southern India, with plans for hundreds more performing tech-heavy financial services and other tasks. None of those jobs got there through traditional "offshoring. " They were never in the USA to begin with. Nearly 40% of start-ups in a new USA TODAY study employ engineers, marketers, analysts and others in jobs created in India and other nations.
The study found that many U.S. start-ups, speeding the pace of globalization, now bypass the USA for nations where customers and cheap labor are plentiful. The newspaper studied 106 software firms, started since 1999, that got money last year from influential investors called venture capitalists. And it may not have hit bottom. Pinching pennies. The other side of outsourcing. Business Week: Outsourcing. Occupational hazard. Who does Bill Gates think he is fooling? Microsoft's Chairman spent the last week of February on the college stump trying to talk up computer engineering. But nothing he can say can overcome the fact that students have been reading announcements from every American high tech company, including Microsoft itself, about thousands of engineering and research jobs being moved to Asia.
On February 16 the Associated Press reported that Siemens announced that the firm will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the US and Western Europe to India, China, and Eastern Europe. "Siemens has recognized that a huge amount of software development activity needs to be moved from high-cost countries to low-cost countries," explained a Siemens managing director. The typical economist is too much a True Believer to notice what is being done to Americans' occupations by outsourcing. Overall, there has been no job growth in three years. Home Shoring. On this Labor Day, thanks to Dustin Crane, some American workers are hearing less about outsourcing and more about "HomeShoring. " Crane is the Chief Executive Officer of the Georgia-based Aelera Corporation. HomeShoring is good news for beleaguered workers because it means jobs stay in America.
When Aelera, a ten-year-old information technology firm needed to expand, Crane did what most other executives do. He thought, "I'll outsource. " Crane had received countless calls from promoters begging him to come to India and other far away places like Armenia and China where—he was told—operating costs would be lower without sacrificing efficiency.
But before committing, Crane decided to do his own fieldwork. Crane didn't like what he found. In China, Crane found pollution so thick he couldn't breathe. Things were no better in India. And no matter where he went, Crane found that language barriers hindered communication. Said Crane, "We have a whole series of questions," Greenberg says.