cioinsight.com — Is outsourcing IT overseas past its prime? According to a new survey, it is. Consider this: Two years ago, 84 percent of the respondents to a Global IT Outsourcing Study sponsored by Chicago-based consulting firm DiamondCluster International said they planned to increase their level of offshore outsourcing. In 2006, that figure fell to 64 percent.
Oct 6, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountOct 7, 2006
Wow Sanman, Way to turn Outsourcing into America bashing.
dissonanceOct 7, 2006
Yes.Outsourcing often just means a company contracts or subcontracts another company to do some work. That other company doesn't necessarily have to be off-shore. Often that other company is in the same country.
williamdyerOct 8, 2006
Correct. India was just the first wave, and many of the problems come from wrongly thinking India is full of competent engineers. In fact, I would not be surprised to find that all the best Indian coders are already moving upmarket from IT coding into R&D jobs.Brazil, Argentina, China, etc. are coming up. Software is a global business. As a consultant, I have clients all over the world, and potential competitors all over the world, too. Been that way for 5 years now for me. And I make more money every year.
bladerunnerxOct 8, 2006
I work as a Database Administrator for an "on-shore" outsourcing company. We have a partnership with an Indian "IT anything" offshoring company. We use them for after hours support and minor DBA tasks. I can tell you from about 2 years of experience working with these people, communication is only one of the problems. Ok, We are on-shore outsourcing, so that's suppoesed to be cheaper. Then we pay this off-shoring company to give is after-hours support. They take a cut of course, and you can see where I am going with this...You get what you pay for no matter where you are in the world. So, we are constantly dealing with "dbas" having so-so resumes and ZERO experience, poor understanding of western culture and language, and definatly NOT out of the box thinkers. So, what does this mean for us?.... They wake us up in the middle of the night to ask us rediculus questions that they already know the answer. They flipout if an event differs slightly from the step-by-step instructions I spent 3hrs to prepare. They bascally send some of the work back with a confusing, "please do the needful". ... just my rant for the night.... had a bad week. :)
Closed AccountOct 8, 2006
After training my Indian replacement, I would have to say that my opinion might be a tad skewed. However, I have never liked Indian phone support. There is a very good reason for this in my opinion. I really prefer to be able to speak, and be spoken to in an understandable dialect of my own language, not some bastardized attempt at the English language. I really prefer to understand my tech support, not spend 95% of my phone call repeating myself in attempts to delve past the language barrier.I would imagine that outsourcing cannot be that cost efficient. Since companies like Dell and Cisco have gone overseas, my tech calls for even the most simple things such as RMA replacement or warranties now take two to three times longer than it did in the past using our wonderful proud-to-be American counter-parts. If incoming calls are taking exponentially more time, actual support received is in decline, and companies are receiving complaints for non-American and hard to understand customer service, I would hope that companies would finally start to understand they stand to lose a lot more than a the few hundred thousand dollars in savings they currently receiving.Plus, I must say, it will be nice for the tech jobs to return to the states so the professionals can stop having to accept the low wage jobs with their many years of experience going to waste, losing 3/4ths their income as a result. Am I bitter? No, however I must say that in their haste to save yet another couple dollars, big name companies have ruined more local lives and even caused a massive exodus from California with their actions.I do not understand one thing, if you take all the jobs away from the people that PURCHASE YOUR WARES, how do you expect them to buy them anymore? A wonderful recipe for failure.
frankiejrOct 8, 2006
Almost a year ago, a company I worked for decided to go with an offshore company for one specific project. They didn't design it, so they didn't want to build it. We built the front end and passed it on to them, the offshore app developers. That's where the *doh* hit the fan.At first, it seemed okay. Then the client started having problems. A LOT of problems, and all of them were before deployment. There's way too big of a story here to post into a comment, so I'll try to sum it up nicely...The company wanted to do it this way to try and keep the client. Unfortunately, they ended up spending more on the combination of managing the project and putting hours into fixing things that they ended up losing money on the project (many people forget to add in management and testing hours when thinking about the cost of offshoring). They saw the whole thing as a mistake, but more importantly, a learning experience.They just hired two new programmers to take on more in-house work. Business couldn't be better for them, and they've vowed never to outsource again.
vocaroOct 8, 2006
past it's prime --> past its prime
alahiriOct 8, 2006
outsourcing is only going to increase however the problem is that the better of the lot will never be satisfied staying there..
webcleanerMar 12, 2008
Let me repeat and reinforce what was said above: Outsourcing has barely just begun. <a class="user" href="http://www.eTEQ.com">http://www.eTEQ.com</a>
kimsonsolutionsJul 11, 2008
Find out why you should outsource your IT support with this article :<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/business_finance/Why_outsource_your_IT_Support">http://digg.com/business_finance/Why_outsource_you ...</a>